Promotion Dossier

Dr. Veton Këpuska Associate Professor Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering College of Engineering Florida Institute of Technology

November 2009

Këpuska Page 1 Table of Contents

Këpuska Promotion Dossier

Table of Contents

Këpuska Page 3 Promotion Dossier

1* Contact Information

Veton Z. Këpuska, PhD Associate Professor

Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering Room 535, F.W. Olin Engineering Building Complex Florida Institue of Technology 150 West University Blvd. Melbourne, FL 32901-6975 USA

Tel. (321) 674-7183 Fax (321) 674-8192 E-mail: [email protected] www: http://my.fit.edu/~vkepuska/web

2* Preface This Promotion Dossier is submitted to the Committee on Faculty Promotions as part of Veton Z. Këpuska application to Florida Institute of Technology for his promotion to the rank of Full Professor in the year 2009. The dossier has been prepared according to the 2009 Florida Tech Faculty Handbook. For the Reviewers' convenience, instructions from the aforementioned handbook have been included in each section of the Dossier and are depicted italicized, portions of which may be emphasized in bold as well as red color to indicate sections that were considered specifically relevant. Also in the electronic copy of the dossier (e.g., pdf format) all sections of the text underlined in blue are hyperlinks linking to the page (www or in the document itself) containing referenced information. This document is organized into three main sections (I-III) closely following Faculty Handbook guidelines. Section I contains the information summarized concisely related to Teaching, Research and Service activities. In addition a short biography is included for completeness as instructed by the Faculty Handbook. The specifics of summarized activities presented in Section I are covered in Section II. Section III contains Appendixes with selected samples of referenced material closely following guidelines of the Faculty Handbook 2009 (rev. October 09) p. 37-38. Each section is preceded by a table of content covered in that section highlighting major headings of the material contained therein. It is placed there to help the reader navigate and find the specific information with ease. It is believed that all sections of this candidacy reflect to a significant degree the promotion criteria based on the FIT policy as specified in section 2.3 - Basis for Appointment and Promotion of aforementioned handbook which states: "Appointments to the faculty or promotion from one academic rank to another shall be primarily based on education, experience, effective performance and in recognition of special merit in some or all of the activities listed above. The criteria for recognition and evaluation of merit shall become progressively more exacting from lower to higher academic ranks. Promotion to the rank of professor shall be reserved to those members who have demonstrated outstanding performance in their respective fields. Training and experience are generally recognized in the educational world as basic requirements for appointments and promotions. They are also recognized by Florida Tech, but without the rigidity so often found in automatic promotion plans. Florida Tech subscribes to the belief that alert and progressive faculty members will benefit from their experience, and that graduate study increases knowledge and broadens perspectives. It is definitely expected that each faculty member will endeavor to earn the terminal degree in his/her field. Under the qualifications indicated above, the university does have a guiding policy on training and experience. It is given here as a general policy to which justified exceptions may be made"

Këpuska Page 7 Promotion Dossier and from the candidates point of view demonstrate a valid basis for this promotion. It is hoped that the Faculty Promotion Committee after careful review of the material will arrive to the same conclusion and hence justify this application and the effort to produce it. The candidate wants to express his gratitude to the Promotion Committee for taking their time and for their effort in reviewing this material.

SECTION I

3* Summary Dossier Material

From APPENDIX II. PROMOTION GUIDELINES: COLLEGE OF ENGINEERING of Faculty Handbook 2008 Section College of Engineering Promotion Guidelines page 39: The areas for evaluation are consistent with those specified in a memo of November 2, 1998 from the Associate Provost, and include (1) Teaching and Related Activities, (2) Scholarly Activities and Research, and (3) Service Activities. Scholarly Activities and Research have traditionally been the primary focus for promotion at U.S. Universities; however, "outstanding" performance in the Teaching and Service areas are also important in the present climate of higher education in America and will be given appropriate recognition.

Table of Contents

4* Summary of Accomplishments

I have joined the Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) department (ECE) department at Florida Institute of Technology in January 2003 with the rank of Associate Professor. I am applying for promotion based on my contribution to FIT in teaching, research and service as summarized in following sections.

Teaching and Related Activities My teaching methodology and practice was recognized by Kerry Bruce Clark Teacher Award 2009. This award is attributed to the achievements presented below.

In spring 2010, FIT is going to be the first University in the world to introduce a new curriculum in Microcomputer Systems 2 utilizing state- of-the-art Texas Instruments DaVinci Embedded Hardware Platform and its

Këpuska Page 9 Promotion Dossier BIOS Operating System. For further information please contact Wicks, Cathy, Director of University Programs at TI ([email protected]). I have introduced a complete set of courses in the ECE graduate program covering the most important aspect of the human communication chain that I call "Speech Vibrations" (http://my.fit.edu/~vkepuska/ SpeechVibrations). Now, the depth of the offered curriculum at FIT completely covers the fascinating area of human communication chain: from the sound vibrations produced by speech, speech signal processing, pattern recognition as applied to speech modeling, speech recognition, natural language understanding and acoustics of American English. To achieve this goal a total of 4 courses were introduced:  Speech Processing ECE 5525  Speech Recognition ECE 5526  Search and Decoding In Speech Recognition ECE 5527  Acoustics of American English Speech ECE 5528 This newly introduced curriculum, is offered only in prestigious schools like Harvard and MIT. In 2006, Harvard University, a top ranking university in the world, and Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 5th ranked university in the world, (http://www.arwu.org/rank/2006/ ARWU2006_Top100.htm) jointly started offering multidisciplinary program in the area of Speech and Hearing Bioscience and Technology emphasizing the exact same areas that I have introduced here at FIT in 2003. For more information on this please visit: http://hst.mit.edu/shbt. At the undergraduate level, I re-designed & re-developed from ground-up new course content and material for the following courses:  Digital State Machines ECE 3541  Microcomputer Systems 1 ECE 3551  Microcomputer Systems 2 ECE 3552  Multifarious Systems 1 ECE 3553  Multifarious Systems 2 ECE 4553 In addition to teaching courses that I have developed, I taught at FIT , the additional courses listed below: Graduate Level:  Computer Networks 2 ECE 5535  Digital System Design 1 ECE 5571

Këpuska Page 10 Promotion Dossier  Digital System Design 2 ECE 5572 Undergraduate Level:  Hardware Software Integration ECE 2552  Signal and Systems ECE 3222  Computer Architecture ECE 4551  Electric and Electronic Circuits ECE4991

In the past 7 years at FIT I taught 15 different courses; that turns out to be on average 2.1 new courses per year. I lectured total of 56 times; that is 8 courses per year. In my lectures I apply innovative teaching methodology taking maximum advantage of technology as elaborated next. My approach to teaching is characterized by a creative and innovative teaching methodology combining state-of-the-art technology enabling to link theory with its practical application. Consequently all my lecture materials for undergraduate and graduate level courses are based on Power Point Presentation notes (e.g., Ch5-Automatic Speech Recognition.ppt) and additional supplemental material that are all WWW accessible. Each class material is publically accessible with the following link: http://my.fit.edu/~vkepuska/web or http://my.fit.edu/~vkepuska/eceYYYY where YYYY is class number (e.g., 5527). The first link is the result of an ECE3553 class project in which my student, Todd Alexander, under my direction has developed a web based application that will allow easy maintenance through a Web based interface to all this material. The total size of teaching material stored and hosted in the university drive is reaching close to 10 GB. Note that this material manly consists of documents containing text (e.g., PowerPoint Presentation Files, Microsoft Documents, html, etc.), source code (e.g., C++, perl, php, C#, etc.), matlab scripts, and other necessary lecture materials (e.g., excel sheets, and databases: mySQL, Microsoft SQL). Furthermore, this innovative teaching style is focused on maximizing students "exit knowledge" rather than relying only on the test scores. Therefore, in all my courses I require from students to demonstrate mastering of the subject area by developing a practical application combining theory with an appropriate application. The demonstration requires students to verbally defend their work through: (1) Presentation, (2) Detailed Documentation (Microsoft Word, README file, source code, etc.) depicting their work, and (3) Implementation and a demonstration of the project implementation. The following link: Example Project exemplifies a typical project outcome from one of my graduate courses and this link: Example Project2 one from my undergraduate level courses. Each project is assessed based on detailed instructions for the project requirements that is provided in reference to course participants. This document resides in each corresponding class link under “Final Project Requirements document” as exemplified in the following link: Këpuska Page 11 Promotion Dossier http://my.fit.edu/~vkepuska/ece3551/Final%20Project%20Requirements.doc. The examination and quality of assessment of the project is conducted by providing each student with at least 30min time slot to present his/her work. Large classes require 2 days of presentation times starting from 8:00 am-12:00 pm, and 1:00pm-6:00pm to complete the examination. Note that registering for a time slot is done with the www based application (see for example http://my.fit.edu/~vkepuska/web/ courses.php#ece3551-projects). Due to my hands-on approach to teaching and research, consistently I get students to work with me. A number of undergraduate students have joined FIT graduate program solely to work under my direction (e.g., Tudor Klein, Raymond Sastraputera, Brandon Schmitt, Xerxes Beharry, Sean Powers, Ronald Ramdhan). Notable achievements are:  First Place in the First Annual Analog Devices & University of Massachusetts DSP Contest 2005 (Brian Ramos and Don McMann), http://faculty.uml.edu/Mufeed_Mahd/UML_ADI/photo_fit.htm),  Third Place in IEEE SouthEastCon 2007 Student Hardware Competition: Basketball Robot among 38 Universities (Ronald Ramdhan, Xerxes Beharry & Sean Powers). http://www.southeastcon.org/2007/students/. The 'Patriot' robot is also displayed in Deans Waite Conference Room.  Best Paper Nomination " 2006-472: A MATLAB TOOL FOR SPEECH PROCESSING, ANALYSIS AND RECOGNITION: SAR-LAB " ASEE 2006 (undergraduate co-authors Rogers N., Patel M.),  Best Junior Design 2007 - Visual Audio - (Brandon Schmitt).  Greatest Commercial Potential - "Smart Room" Senior Design 2008. (Matt Hopkins, David Herndon, Patrick Marinelli).  Received distinguished evaluation from undergraduate students (Andrew Stiles, Frederic Gertz and Brandon Schmitt) for directing the research project supported by NSF IIS grant 0647018 REU: Collaborative Research: Advances of Machine Learning in Theory & Applications (AMALTHEA) (see attached relevant portion of the document highlighted in yellow). AMALTHEA Focus Group Report 2007  Tudor Klein who joined the ECE graduate program to work under my guidance has earned internship (2006) with Microsoft and later a fulltime employment (2007) with their Speech Recognition group;  Ronald Ramdhan my undergraduate and now graduate student has earned an internship with Apple and was extended full time employment after graduation;  Andrew Sweeny has joined Microsoft's Networking Group.

Këpuska Page 12 Promotion Dossier As a major advisor I have graduated 1 PhD student and 6 MS degree students with thesis option. Currently I advise 2 PhD students and 5 Master- degree students all with thesis option (non thesis option students are not listed nor counted). Note that I have served or serving as advisory committee member for additional 4 PhD Students and 4 MS non ECE students. For further details consult Advising Activities section.

Scholarly Activities and Research In the past year I have produced the following:

Publications:  1 Patent Application,  2 Journal Publications Published, 2 Submitted, 1 to be Submitted (December).  3 Conference Publications Published, 1 Submitted,  3 NSF proposals as PI, additional 1 NSF proposal to be submitted due December 17, and 2 as CoPI.

For more information please see the section Brief History of the Candidate.

Research:  Organized and Hosted NIST Rich Transcription Evaluation Workshop (reviews depicting the quality of organization of this event are attached in NIST Rich Transcription Evaluation Workshop 2009),  Participated in International "NIST Rich Transcription Evaluation" 2009,  Secured 64 Microphone Array from NIST for Research,  Designed and Developed a Currency Bills High-Speed Scanner for iCVn (www.icvn.com),  Collaborating with Circular Logic to evaluate their nonlinear filter for signal enhancement and sound separation (www.circular-logic.com)

Software and Hardware Development  Developing a web portal with my graduate students for TRDA of Melbourne in collaboration with Nterspec.  Completed PPT Commander – A Voice Only Activated Application  Ported PPT Commander to Apple Mac OS  Developed Voice Activated Elevator Simulator:

Këpuska Page 13 Promotion Dossier · http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j5CeVtQMvK0 · http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OQ8eyBTbS_E  Developed a Nursing Call Station Voice Only Activated interface for patients. Extending its capability for the patient to control its bed, TV and other devices connected to the system.  Developed a Voice Activated Car Inspection System prototype for BMW: · http://files.me.com/hardcaseron/l3byyd.mov  Developed a High Speed Currency Bill's Scanning System using Embedded Hardware.

Funding  Over $60,000.00 of funding from iCVn as support and equipment for R&D work on High Speed Scanner.  NSF funded projects ($260,000.00).  NSF pending funds ($205,641.00 + $185,700.00 = $391,341.00).  NSF to be submitted (December 17, 2009) pending funds ~$400,000.00

Integration of Students in the Research My most important research and educational contribution to Florida Tech, is my dedication to involving undergraduates in research. All my achievements with the students were done with undergraduate students or with graduate students that were raised from FIT undergraduate ranks (e.g., Tudor Klein, Sean Powers, Brandon Schmitt, Xerxes Beharry, Ronald Ramdhan, Raymond Sastraputera, Chris Hellriegel, Pattarapong Rojansthien). In particular, I pride myself for (i) my heavy focus on undergraduate research that produced a wealth of outcomes especially over the past 3 years, (ii) establishment of reputable collaborative partnership with industry, and (iii) for a major educational collaboration that I have contributed through collaborative work that I have done with Dr. Anagnostopoulos and other faculty at FIT and elsewhere (FGCU, UCF). The support for research that I have conducted since I have joined FIT comes from my industry partners and from government sponsored programs. My research activity draws on my past extensive experience in conducting cutting-edge Research and Development work for the top companies in the world (for details see Appendix A3: Supporting Documentation for Scholarly and Research Related Activities. ). As of now, I consider my main scientific contribution to be the solution that I have invented in the area of my specialty: Speech Processing and Recognition. I have solved a difficult problem for which there are no other appropriate solutions. The problem can be summarized as

Këpuska Page 14 Promotion Dossier discrimination between a target word/phrase having a wake-up or alerting context (e.g., “Alex, I need to talk to you.”) from that same word/phrase in a referential context (e.g., “Today I talked to Alex on the phone.”). I have developed a revolutionary speech recognition technology (called Wake-Up- Word or WUW for short) that solves this problem. This solution can change how we can interact with computers. Furthermore, this solution can be applied to general speech recognition problem thus improving their accuracy over 1,500%-30,000% providing solutions that approach human performance. The solution is protected by my two US patents: ("Scoring and re-scoring dynamic time warping of speech" US # 7,085,717, and "Dynamic time warping using frequency distributed distance measures", US # 6,983,246). Those patents although only issued recently, are referenced in by following patents: 7,437,291 Using partial information to improve dialog in automatic speech recognition systems 7,143,034 Dynamic time warping device for detecting a reference pattern having a smallest matching cost value with respect to a test pattern, and speech recognition apparatus using the same 7,085,717 Scoring and re-scoring dynamic time warping of speech 5,455,889 Labeling speech using context-dependent acoustic prototypes I strongly advocate and practice teaching approach that bridges the gap between theory and practice. This approach has allowed me to establish a number of strategic partnerships with industry: ThinkEngine Networks (http://www.thinkengine.com), iCVn (http://www.iCVn.com), QTSI (http://www.qtsi.com), PCB (http://www.pcb.com), Knigh's Armament Company (http://www.knightarmco.com), BMW, Microsoft, etc. With industry partnerships I have been able to support me and my students research. The current total amount of direct support from industry exceeds $250,000. For example, ThinkEngine Networks (http://www.thinkengine.com) supported my research in speech recognition for first 2.5 years at FIT (~$82000). For more information please consult my Résumé and/or contact a former senior Vice Presidents of Research: Geoffrey Parkhurst: [email protected] and Paul Gagne: paul@rpm- communications.com (detailed contact information also listed under references from industry section). In addition, through my industry collaborators, I have brought in equipment worth well over $60,000. In the ongoing collaboration with iCVn of Baltimore my team is designing a new hardware that will augment the Shinwoo money counting device with a scanner capable of reading serial numbers from any currency (e.g., US Dollars, UK Pounds, SW Franks, European Union Euros, etc.), configured by software that we are also developing. We have also re-designed and re-implemented their core application software that now connects to the Shinwoo device and

Këpuska Page 15 Promotion Dossier communicates with it. As of October 2008, iCVn has already contributed over $20,000 worth of equipment and over $40,000 direct support for me and my students' (Sean Powers, Xerxes Beharry, Jacob Zurasky, Andrew Leslie Sweeny, Alex Roberts) research and development efforts. For further information please contact Theodore Paraskevakos, President and CEO at [email protected] (detailed contact information also listed under references from industry section). Additional source of funding is expected to materialize soon in collaboration with KnightArmor Co. Please, note that due to the proprietary and classified nature of the research the results of all these efforts cannot be legally published or publicly documented. For further information please refer to George Kontis Vice President KnightArmor Co: [email protected] (detailed contact information also listed under references from industry section). QTSI, a Cocoa Beach based company - During the first half of 2006 I have completed a very import pilot study for QTSI of Cocoa Beach utilizing my Wake-Up-Word Speech Recognition Technology to Seismic Signals. The achieved results from this study, according to professionals in that field, are the best compared to up-to-date currently published reports. For further information please contact Dr. Ken Ports [email protected], a senior Manager at QTSI and former colleague of ECE Department. I must note that If it was not for proprietary nature of the conducted research, a large number of papers could have been publishing just from this effort alone. Detailed contact information also listed under references from industry section. PCB, an internationally recognized corporation, has donated over $5,000.00 worth of specialized industrial quality equipment consisting of high precision microphones and data acquisition equipment for microphone array research. In addition PCB is partnering with myself for NSF’s MRI research proposal to establish a largest microphone array laboratory in the south east. Contact information: Ray Rautenstrauch [email protected]. Additional notable collaborations are listed below:  BMW – Actively working with Dr. Joachim G. Taiber, BMW Group, Head of IT Research Office, Information Technology Research Center (ITRC), Greenville South Carolina.  Tudor Klein and Microsoft - Working with Microsoft through my former Graduate Student, Tudor Klein, to establish an appropriate relationship to contribute development of their new-generation of speech recognition software. Contact information [email protected].  NIST, Speech Group - I have enrolled an FIT team (Arthur Kunkle and Dileep Koneru) in NIST sponsored evaluation effort, Rich Transcription Evaluation Project, with a goal to further advance speech recognition area. At a moment I have two graduate students actively involved in this project that if successful will bring significant

Këpuska Page 16 Promotion Dossier attention to FIT. The goal of our participation is not only to use existing technologies but also to incorporate my inventions into existing systems (e.g., HTK and Sphinx) demonstrating their superiority over conventional methods. At the beginning of the year 2010 I will be launching a web site (http://VoiceKey.fit.edu) through which a 90 day free trial of the PowerPoint Commander - a voice activated Power Point presentation software application will be offered. This cross platform (Windows as well as Microsoft OS) application is the result of research and developed that I have done over the past 8 years. This application incorporates my Wake-Up-Word (WUW) Speech Recognizer. It enables users to control their power-point presentation program using voice only. The uniqueness of the application is the ability of the technology to distinguish a presentation speech from the speakers command. For example:  Presentation Speech: "Processing of speech signal requires application of short time analysis. The overall process is depicted in the block diagram presented in the next slide."  Command: "Computer! Go to Next Slide." Although speech recognition technology has been around for over 25 years, it has to be emphasized that this kind of accuracy performance required by this application has not been developed by any commercial or research institutions yet, and thus my WUW technology has a potential to revolutionize the way we communicate with computers. Up to date I have submitted 19 proposals to NSF: 13 of which I am PD/PI. The total worth of these research projects was $5,524,797.00. In addition I have submitted a $10-Million multi-institutional, collaborative Center of Excellence proposal, as a co-PI to the Florida Board of Governors. The proposal ended up being among the top 10 proposals in scientific merit as judged by the prestigious Oak Ridge Associated Universities reviewers (ORAU: Top 10 in Scientific Review Ranking). My contribution as judged by my pears was critical to the scientific merit ranking of the proposal (see Dr. Rodriguez recommendation). Two (2) NSF projects were awarded (totaling $260,000) and 1 is pending ($1,198,728). I have also submitted 3 proposals: to Rockwell Collins, State of Florida and Lindberg Ann Foundation as PI/Co-PI totaling $2,156,012. In addition I have submitted a number of SBIR proposals, one of which was invited proposal by National Institute of Justice (NIJ) of the US Government. For further details please consult list of proposals table. Succinctly put, I have generated or I have been involved in generation of on average greater than 3.3 proposals per year. A plethora of additional outcomes are the fruit of two major projects (totaling $260,000): (1) EMD-MLR project sponsored by NSF and supported through grant DUE-CCLI-0341601 of $99,996 under the Course, Curriculum and Laboratories Improvement (CCLI) program and the Educational

Këpuska Page 17 Promotion Dossier Materials Development (EMD) track, and (2) AMALTHEA project (AMALTHEA REU Site) also sponsored by NSF under the Research Experiences for Undergraduates (REU) program and grant IIS-REU-0647018 for $160,701 over a period of 3 years (2007-2010). I am a Co-PI that played a crucial role in its successful execution as elaborated in detail in Supporting Documentation for Scholarly and Research Related Activities section. I have completed two chapters of an innovative Digital Signal Processing text book for undergraduates. I plan to complete the book proposal by end of 2011 and have it presented to publishers. The chapters are included in the Appendix A2: Supporting Documentation for Teaching and Related Activities..

Service Activities In May 2009, FIT has hosted NIST Rich Transcription Evaluation Workshop. I have organized, managed and executed the workshop. The reviews of the quality of organization of the event are attached in Appendix (NIST Rich Transcription Evaluation Workshop 2009 under the section A4. Supporting Documentation for Service and Related Activities). As a result of my efforts and my collaborators efforts, we have created the uCollaborator Coalition of Excellence (uCE, pronounced "you see") along with other researchers at Florida Gulf Coast University, University of Central Florida (Institute for Simulation and Training) and industrial partners (www.ucollaborator.com). Currently, uCE is engaging in research, development, and commercialization of a new breed of ubiquitous collaboration technologies. And, recently, the coalition has submitted a couple of grant proposals for developing an open-platform to connect the physical and virtual worlds both synchronously (same time) and asynchronously (anytime, anywhere) and I took the lead on one of them as indicated in previous section and detailed in Research and Scholarly Activities section. In 2004 & 2005 I and Dr. Marius Silaghi have proposed and introduced a Special Speech Processing and Recognition track in FLAIRS. This task entailed hosting the www site with the information about the new track, collecting the papers, recruiting reviewers, organizing, conducting and managing the peer review process, and notifying the conference chair of the final list of accepted papers. In addition I have also served as a session chair to both of those sessions. In total I have served as chair in 3 conferences (FLAIRS 2004 & 2005) as well as ASEE 2006. In ASEE I was invited to serve as a session chair. In addition, my paper was nominated for best paper award out of total of 9 nominated papers (see Best Paper Nomination section). I have served as a professional reviewer for the: Wiley and Sons book “Speech and Audio Signal Processing: Processing and Perception of Speech and Music”, by Gold, Morgan; Elsevier's Journals of Speech Communication, Neural Networks, and Nonlinear Analysis, IEEE Transactions on Neural Networks (2007), ACM Symposium on Applied Computing – NLSP (2008), Këpuska Page 18 Promotion Dossier FLAIRS (2005 and 2006); First Conference on Information Technology and Engineering Sciences, Kosova (2007). Served as Reviewer for Academic Advancement of Dr. Dimitrios Charalampidis - ECE department of University of New Orleans. I typically advise 25-35 undergraduate students each year, and directly work with at least 2 junior and senior design teams. I also serve as advisor to Chi Phi student society here at Florida Tech. The additional service activities include representing ECE department in FIT's Graduate Curriculum Committee (2003-2005). Served as member of Department Head Search Committee (2007) as well as currently in Faculty Search Committee (2008-2009). Serving in ECE department's ABET and Curriculum Committee. In addition as a only Computer Engineering Faculty with a Computer Engineering Degree I advice directly my Department Head in all matters regarding to Computer Engineering Curriculum. Finally, my activities contributed to university's outreach efforts through AMALTHEA and EMD-MLR; NSF funded projects; I have represented FIT in Harris Engineering Week several times (2004-2008), LASER DAY (2005-2007) and personal presentations at BCC, Melbourne L.B. Johnson Middle School, Cocoa Beach High School. Finally I am serving as a judge in the science fair for Central Brevard Catholic Homeschool Group (2007, 2008) (e-mail: [email protected]). Since 2000, I serve as a member of Board of Directors for a non- governmental human-rights organization "Center For Balkan Development". For more information please see http://www.friendsofbosnia.org/ who_board.html.

5* Brief History of the Candidate

This section should be a narrative summarizing the candidate’s activities since the last promotion and emphasizing those activities for which promotion is deserved. For candidates recently employed by Florida Tech, appropriate activities at the former employment, as well as at Florida Tech should be delineated and discussed. The current résumé contained in Appendix A1 should be referenced.

I was part of the second generation that attended a prestigious high- school, Mathematical Gymnasium, in Prishtina, Kosova. In addition to regular curriculum, I was taught 9-12 credit hours per each semester of various mathematical subject areas including theory of axiomatic disciplines, and Lobachevski geometry, Physics including Einstein's Special Theory of Relativity as well as General Theory of Relativity, as well as classical science subjects Chemistry and Biology. My diploma work/high-school Thesis was "Experimental Methods for Measurement of Speed of Light". Before my academic appointment at Florida Tech I have been a lecturer in University of Prishtina, Kosova from 1981-1984. I taught classes covering areas such as Control Theory, Digital Communications, Theory of Algorithms, Fortran Programming, and Digital Logic and Design. In 1984 I was awarded a Fulbright Fellowship that enabled me to pursue Graduate Studies in the US. I continued my graduate studies (that I had already started in University of Zagreb) at Clemson University, earning my master's and doctoral degrees in Computer Engineering in the Summer of 1986 and 1990 respectively under the valuable advising of Dr. John Gowdy. The doctoral research area was in the speech recognition area and that work was summarized in dissertation titled "Artificial Neural Networks for Speech Recognition Applications". After graduation I pursued Post-Doctoral Research at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule) in Zürich - also known as the MIT of Europe, where renown physicist Albert Einstein studied and taught. I was involved in an image understanding research project: Design and Analysis of Spatial Image Sequence directed by Dr. Armin Grün director of Institute of Geodesy and Photogrammetry. The work conducted in this institute resulted into 2 journal publications, 5 conference publications and 5 technical reports. While at the Institute I organized and carried out a workshop on "Neural Networks". In 1993, I entered the high-tech industry as R&D scientist in the speech recognition area. I started my carrier with Voice-Processing Corporation until 1996 that merged then with Voice Control Systems until 1997 (both acquired by Nuance). I was with the Speech Recognition commercialization group of BBN Technologies of Cambridge Massachusetts until 1999 working with renown scientists: John Makhoul and Richard Schwartz. In 1999 I joined then SpeechWorks corporation that later become Nuance; a leading commercial speech recognition technology provider with headquarters in Burlington, Massachusetts. Those early years working on

Këpuska Page 20 Promotion Dossier cutting edge technology development were crucial to my professional growth and understanding of the scientific problem of speech recognition and speech production. Due to the proprietary nature of the research and development work, no publications of my past work are possible without violating the law. The accumulated expertise in this area landed me with a critical position in then recently established company ThinkEngine Networks in Marlborough Massachusetts. I worked on a problem that even today there is no appropriate solution. The problem can be summarized as discrimination between a target sentinel word/phrase having a wake-up or alerting context (e.g., “Computer, open PowerPoint presentation.”) from that same word/phrase in a referential context (e.g., “My Computer is a quad-core CPU with 8 GB of RAM.”), for which I have developed a revolutionary speech recognition technology (called Wake-Up-Word or WUW for short) that can change how we can interact with computers. The solution is protected by my two US patents: ("Scoring and re-scoring dynamic time warping of speech" US # 7,085,717, and "Dynamic time warping using frequency distributed distance measures", US # 6,983,246), and presently patent application (September 15, 2009) "Exploiting Differences in Correlations for Modeled and Un-Modeled Sequences by Transforming Trained Model Topology in Sequence Recognition" AP# 61242569, EFS ID: 6076846. I joined FIT to bring in all that knowledge and know-how to its students and to pursue possible commercialization of this revolutionary speech recognition technology. My activities at FIT are detailed in Summary of Accomplishments, Main Dossier and Appendix sections.

SECTION II

6* Main Dossier Material

From APPENDIX II. PROMOTION GUIDELINES: COLLEGE OF ENGINEERING of Faculty Handbook 2008 Section College of Engineering Promotion Guidelines page 39: The areas for evaluation are consistent with those specified in a memo of November 2, 1998 from the Associate Provost, and include (1) Teaching and Related Activities, (2) Scholarly Activities and Research, and (3) Service Activities. Scholarly Activities and Research have traditionally been the primary focus for promotion at U.S. Universities; however, "outstanding" performance in the Teaching and Service areas are also important in the present climate of higher education in America and will be given appropriate recognition.

Table of Contents Promotion Dossier

7* Teaching and Related Activities

From College of Engineering Promotion Guidelines: The candidate for Full Professor will have a record of performance that includes many of the activities specified below: (1) A consistent record of teaching excellence, versatility and student production at both the undergraduate and graduate levels. (2) Published or made significant contributions to a textbook in his/her field. (3) Served as the major advisor for M.S. as well as Ph.D. graduates. (4) Served as faculty representative (advisor) to student clubs, societies or organizations. (5) Served on both M.S. and Ph.D. committees in own and in other academic departments. (6) Been an active member of regional and/or national educational societies/organizations. (7) Introduced new courses into the curriculum, developed new academic programs, or made significant modifications to an existing academic program, at the undergraduate and/or graduate level. (8) Received funding from outside agencies or foundations for curriculum development, enhancing teaching laboratories, etc. (9) Developed and introduced innovative pedagogical techniques.

Course Instruction and Development

(1) A consistent record of teaching excellence, versatility and student production at both the undergraduate and graduate levels. (7) Introduced new courses into the curriculum, developed new academic programs, or made significant modifications to an existing academic program, at the undergraduate and/or graduate level.

In the past 7 years at FIT I taught 15 different courses; that turns out to be on average 2.1 new courses per year. I lectured total of 56 times; that is 8 courses per year. In my lectures I apply innovative teaching methodology taking maximum advantage of technology.

Graduate Level Course Development I have introduced a complete set of 4 graduate level courses in ECE graduate program covering the most important aspect of human communication chain that I call "Speech Vibrations" (http://my.fit.edu/ ~vkepuska/SpeechVibrations). This newly introduced curriculum is offered only in prestigious schools like Harvard and MIT. Only recently (2006), Harvard University, a top ranking university in the world, and Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 5th ranked university in the world, (http://www.arwu.org/rank/2006/ARWU2006_Top100.htm) jointly started offering multidisciplinary program in the area of Speech and Hearing Promotion Dossier Bioscience and Technology emphasizing the exact same areas that I have introduced here at FIT in 2003. For more information on this please visit: http://hst.mit.edu/shbt. Now, the depth of offered curriculum at FIT completely covers the fascinating area of human communication chain: from the sound vibrations produced by speech, speech signal processing, pattern recognition as applied to speech modeling, speech recognition, natural language understanding and acoustics of American English. To achieve this goal a total of 4 courses were introduced:  Speech Processing ECE 5525  Speech Recognition ECE 5526  Search and Decoding In Speech Recognition ECE 5527  Acoustics of American English Speech ECE 5528

Undergraduate Level Course Development At the undergraduate level, I have designed & developed new academic programs for 5 courses - 4 of which require laboratory exercises, listed below:  Digital State Machines ECE 3541  Microcomputer Systems 1 ECE 3551  Microcomputer Systems 2 ECE 3552  Multifarious Systems 1 ECE 3553  Multifarious Systems 2 ECE 4553

All the above courses are required courses in Computer Engineering and/or Engineering Program. Microcomputer Systems 1&2 (4 Credit Hour Courses) and Multifarious Systems 1&2 (4 Credit Hour Courses) required also development of laboratory exercises. Digital State Machines course now covers the area of Finite State Machines – a necessary curriculum for any Computer Engineering students. Note that this area was not offered by ECE department in the past. The curriculum for ECE3551 & 3552 (Microcomputer Systems 1&2) class is now focused on Embedded Systems Development using DSP Processors. It aligns FIT's Electrical and Computer Engineering program with top schools in the nation by covering cutting-edge, state-of-the-art technology and development practices for speech, audio and video processing on embedded hardware. Promotion Dossier Students that have taken those courses will be highly marketable and competitive and will possess valued skills in the area that is covered by only few academic institutions in North America. In addition it fulfills the growing need of the industry for embedded systems development (e.g., cellular phones like the iPhone) raising in this manner FIT’s academic standing with industry. For Multifarious Systems 1&2 I made significant modifications by re-designing & developing the curriculum to meet current demands for Web Based Application Development, while keeping up with the state-of-the-art of constantly changing technologies in this area. Two student groups have established their own companies utilizing their skills obtained in this class (Bryan Jenks, Jonathan Bredemeyer, and Joseph Pearce).

Course Instruction In addition to teaching courses that I have developed, I taught at FIT , the following courses: Graduate Level:  Computer Networks 2 ECE 5535  Digital System Design 1 ECE 5571  Digital System Design 2 ECE 5572 Undergraduate Level:  Hardware Software Integration ECE 2552  Signal and Systems ECE 3222  Computer Architecture ECE 4551  Electric and Electronic Circuits ECE4991 All listed courses are required courses for Electrical Engineering and/or Computer Engineering Program and also required for non ECE students (ECE4991).

Courses Taught in Reverse-Chronological Order  ECE 3551 (Fall 2009) Microcomputer Systems 1 Upper division undergraduate course - Required for ECE majors Class enrollment: 31 students Student / Teacher evaluations: N/A  ECE 3553 (Fall 2009) Multifarious Systems 1 Upper division undergraduate course - Required for CPE majors Class enrollment: 13 students Student / Teacher evaluations: N/A  ECE 5527 (Fall 2009) Promotion Dossier Search and Decoding in Speech Recognition Graduate Upper Level Course Class enrollment: 7 students Student / Teacher evaluations: N/A  ECE 5999 (Fall 2009) Thesis Graduate Thesis Course Class enrollment: 3 students Student / Teacher evaluations: N/A  ECE 6999 (Fall 2009) Dissertation Graduate Thesis Course Class enrollment: 1 students Student / Teacher evaluations: N/A

 ECE 3551 (Spring 2009) Microcomputer Systems 1 Upper division undergraduate course - Required for ECE majors Class enrollment: 42 students Student / Teacher evaluations: N/A  ECE 3552 (Spring 2009) Microcomputer Systems 2 Upper division undergraduate course - Required for CPE majors Class enrollment: 17 students Student / Teacher evaluations: N/A  ECE 5526 (Spring 2009) Speech Recognition Graduate Upper Level Course Class enrollment: 3 students Student / Teacher evaluations: N/A  ECE 5999 (Spring 2009) Thesis Graduate Thesis Course Class enrollment: 4 students Student / Teacher evaluations: N/A  ECE 6999 (Spring 2009) Dissertation Graduate Thesis Course Class enrollment: 1 students Student / Teacher evaluations: N/A

 ECE 5999 (Fall 2008) Thesis Graduate Thesis Course Class enrollment: 5 students Student / Teacher evaluations: N/A  ECE 5525 (Fall 2008) Promotion Dossier Speech Processing Graduate Upper Level Course Class enrollment: 6 students Student / Teacher evaluations: N/A  ECE 3553 (Fall 2008) Multifarious Systems 1 Upper division undergraduate course - Required for CE majors Class enrollment: 18 students Student / Teacher evaluations: N/A  ECE 3551 (Fall 2008) Microcomputer Systems 1 Upper division undergraduate course - Required for ECE majors Class enrollment: 18 students Student / Teacher evaluations: N/A  ECE 3541 (Fall 2008) Digital State Machines Upper division undergraduate course - Required for CE majors Class enrollment: 11 students Student / Teacher evaluations: N/A Note: This course is completely re-developed and covers an area of Final State Machines that should have originally been covered.

 ECE 5570 (Summer 2008) Special Topics in Computer Engineering Linked to AMALTHEA NSF REU Project Class enrollment: 2 students Student / Teacher evaluations: N/A  ECE 3541 (Summer 2008) Digital State Machines Upper division undergraduate course - Required for CE majors Class enrollment: 16 students Student / Teacher evaluations: N/A Note: This course is completely re-developed and covers an area of Final State Machines that should have originally been covered.  ECE 3222 (Summer 2008) Signal and Systems Upper division undergraduate course - Required for ECE majors Class enrollment: 12 students Student / Teacher evaluations: N/A

 ECE 5999 (Spring 2008) Thesis Graduate Thesis Course Class enrollment: 2 students Student / Teacher evaluations: N/A  ECE 5526 (Spring 2008) Speech Recognition Promotion Dossier Graduate Upper Level Course Class enrollment: 10 students Student / Teacher evaluations: N/A  ECE 3552 (Spring 2008) Microcomputer Systems 2 Upper division undergraduate course - Required for ECE majors Class enrollment: 18 students Student / Teacher evaluations: N/A  ECE 3551 (Spring 2008) Microcomputer Systems 1 Upper division undergraduate course - Required for ECE majors Class enrollment: 20 students Student / Teacher evaluations: N/A

 ECE 5999 (Fall 2007) Thesis Graduate Thesis Course Class enrollment: 1 students Student / Teacher evaluations: N/A  ECE 5527 (Fall 2007) Search and Decoding in Speech Recognition Graduate Upper Level Course Class enrollment: 5 students Student / Teacher evaluations: N/A  ECE 5525 (Fall 2007) Speech Processing Graduate Upper Level Course Class enrollment: 4 students Student / Teacher evaluations: N/A  ECE 3553 (Fall 2007) Multifarious Systems 1 Upper division undergraduate course - Required for CE majors Class enrollment: 16 students Student / Teacher evaluations: N/A  ECE 3551 (Fall 2007) Microcomputer Systems 1 Upper division undergraduate course - Required for ECE majors Class enrollment: 29 students Student / Teacher evaluations: N/A

 ECE 5999 (Summer 2007) Thesis Graduate Thesis Course Class enrollment: 1 students Student / Teacher evaluations: N/A

 ECE 6999 (Spring 2007) Promotion Dossier Dissertation Graduate Dissertation Research Course Class enrollment: 1 students Student / Teacher evaluations: N/A  ECE 5999 (Spring 2007) Thesis Graduate Thesis Course Class enrollment: 1 students Student / Teacher evaluations: N/A  ECE 5526 (Spring 2007) Speech Recognition Graduate Upper Level Course Class enrollment: 1 students Student / Teacher evaluations: N/A  ECE 4800 (Spring 2007) Independent Study Class enrollment: 2 students Student / Teacher evaluations: N/A  ECE 3552 (Spring 2007) Microcomputer Systems 2 Upper division undergraduate course - Required for ECE majors Class enrollment: 11 students Student / Teacher evaluations: N/A  ECE 3551 (Spring 2007) Microcomputer Systems 1 Upper division undergraduate course - Required for ECE majors Class enrollment: 16 students Student / Teacher evaluations: N/A

 ECE 6999 (Fall 2006) Dissertation Graduate Dissertation Research Course Class enrollment: 1 students Student / Teacher evaluations: N/A  ECE 5999 (Fall 2006) Thesis Graduate Thesis Course Class enrollment: 1 students Student / Teacher evaluations: N/A  ECE 5525 (Fall 2006) Speech Processing Graduate Upper Level Course Class enrollment: 4 students Student / Teacher evaluations: N/A  ECE 4553 (Fall 2006) Multifarious Systems 2 Upper division undergraduate Class enrollment: 6 students Promotion Dossier Student / Teacher evaluations: N/A  ECE 3553 (Fall 2006) Multifarious Systems 1 Upper division undergraduate course - Required for CE majors Class enrollment: 13 students Student / Teacher evaluations: N/A  ECE 3552 (Fall 2006) Microcomputer Systems 2 Upper division undergraduate course - Required for ECE majors Class enrollment: 1 students Student / Teacher evaluations: N/A  ECE 3551 (Fall 2006) Microcomputer Systems 1 Upper division undergraduate course - Required for ECE majors Class enrollment: 29 students Student / Teacher evaluations: N/A

 ECE 6999 (Spring 2006) Dissertation Graduate Dissertation Research Course Class enrollment: 1 students Student / Teacher evaluations: N/A  ECE 5526 (Spring 2006) Speech Recognition Graduate Upper Level Course Class enrollment: 1 students Student / Teacher evaluations: N/A  ECE 2552 (Spring 2006) Software Hardware Integration Upper division undergraduate course - Required for ECE majors Class enrollment: 18 students Student / Teacher evaluations: N/A  ECE 2551 (Spring 2006) Software Hardware Design Lower division undergraduate course - Required for ECE majors Class enrollment: 2 students Student / Teacher evaluations: N/A

 ECE 6999 (Fall 2005) Dissertation Graduate Dissertation Research Course Class enrollment: 2 students Student / Teacher evaluations: N/A  ECE 5595 (Fall 2005) Special Project in Computer Engineering Graduate Thesis Course Promotion Dossier Class enrollment: 1 students Student / Teacher evaluations: N/A  ECE 5525 (Fall 2005) Speech Processing Graduate Upper Level Course Class enrollment: 3 students Student / Teacher evaluations: N/A  ECE 4991 (Fall 2005) Electrical and Electronic Circuits Upper division undergraduate - required for non ECE engineering majors Class enrollment: 61 students Student / Teacher evaluations: N/A  ECE 3553 (Fall 2005) Multifarious Systems 1 Upper division undergraduate course - Required for CE majors Class enrollment: 38 students Student / Teacher evaluations: N/A

 ECE 6999 (Summer 2005) Dissertation Graduate Dissertation Research Course Class enrollment: 1 students Student / Teacher evaluations: N/A  ECE 4001 (Summer 2005) Special Topics Upper division undergraduate Class enrollment: 1 students Student / Teacher evaluations: N/A  ECE 2552 (Summer 2005) Software Hardware Integration Upper division undergraduate course - Required for ECE majors Class enrollment: 8 students Student / Teacher evaluations: N/A

 ECE 6999 (Spring 2005) Dissertation Graduate Dissertation Research Course Class enrollment: 3 students Student / Teacher evaluations: N/A  ECE 5595 (Spring 2005) Special Projects in Computer Engineering Graduate Upper Level Course Class enrollment: 4 students Student / Teacher evaluations: N/A  ECE 5525 (Spring 2005) Speech Processing Graduate Upper Level Course Promotion Dossier Class enrollment: 4 students Student / Teacher evaluations: N/A  ECE 2552 (Spring 2005) Software Hardware Integration Upper division undergraduate course - Required for ECE majors Class enrollment: 32 students Student / Teacher evaluations: N/A

 ECE 6999 (Fall 2004) Dissertation Graduate Dissertation Research Course Class enrollment: 1 students Student / Teacher evaluations: N/A  ECE 5999 (Fall 2004) Thesis Graduate Thesis Course Class enrollment: 1 students Student / Teacher evaluations: N/A  ECE 5595 (Fall 2004) Special Project in Computer Engineering Graduate Thesis Course Class enrollment: 1 students Student / Teacher evaluations: N/A  ECE 5525 (Fall 2004) Speech Processing Graduate Upper Level Course Class enrollment: 3 students Student / Teacher evaluations: N/A  ECE 3553 (Fall 2004) Multifarious Systems 1 Upper division undergraduate course - Required for CE majors Class enrollment: 31 students Student / Teacher evaluations: N/A

 ECE 5999 (Summer 2004) Thesis Graduate Thesis Research Course Class enrollment: 2 students Student / Teacher evaluations: N/A  ECE 2552 (Summer 2004) Software Hardware Integration Upper division undergraduate course - Required for ECE majors Class enrollment: 6 students Student / Teacher evaluations: N/A

 ECE 5999 (Spring 2004) Promotion Dossier Thesis Graduate Thesis Research Course Class enrollment: 2 students Student / Teacher evaluations: N/A  ECE 5526 (Spring 2004) Speech Recognition Graduate Upper Level Course Class enrollment: 3 students Student / Teacher evaluations: N/A  ECE 5525 (Spring 2004) Speech Processing Graduate Upper Level Course Class enrollment: 2 students Student / Teacher evaluations: N/A

 ECE 5999 (Fall 2003) Thesis Graduate Thesis Research Course Class enrollment: 1 students Student / Teacher evaluations: N/A  ECE 5525 (Fall 2003) Speech Processing Graduate Upper Level Course Class enrollment: 5 students Student / Teacher evaluations: N/A  ECE 4551 (Fall 2003) Computer Architecture Undergraduate Upper Level Course Class enrollment: 65 students Student / Teacher evaluations: N/A

 ECE 5572 (Summer 2003) Digital Systems Design 2 Upper division undergraduate Class enrollment: 12 students Student / Teacher evaluations: N/A

 ECE 5571 (Spring 2003) Digital Systems Design 1 Upper division undergraduate Class enrollment: 12 students Student / Teacher evaluations: N/A  ECE 5535 (Spring 2003) Computer Networks 2 Graduate Upper Level Course Class enrollment: 35 students Student / Teacher evaluations: N/A Promotion Dossier

Innovative Pedagogical Techniques

(9) Developed and introduced innovative pedagogical techniques

A creative and innovative teaching methodology combining state-of- the-art technology enabling to link theory with its practical application characterizes my approach to teaching.

Teaching Material Consequently all my lecture materials for undergraduate and graduate level courses are based on Power Point Presentation Notes (e.g., Ch5- Automatic Speech Recognition.ppt) and additional supplemental material that are WWW-accessible; see http://my.fit.edu/~vkepuska/web or http://my.fit.edu/~vkepuska/eceYYYY where YYYY is class number. The first link is the result of an ece3553 class project in which my student, Todd Alexander, under my direction has developed a system that will allow easy maintenance of a Web based interface to all this material. Total size of teaching material, manly documents containing text, source code (C++, perl, PHP, html, C#), matlab and other scripts, etc. stored in the university drive is reaching close to 10 GB.

Teaching Style Furthermore, this innovative teaching style is focused on maximizing students' "exit knowledge" rather than relying only on test scores. Therefore, in all my courses I require from students to demonstrate mastering of the subject area by developing a practical application combining theory with a practical application. The demonstration requires students to verbally defend their work through a (1) Presentation, (2) Detailed Documentation (Microsoft Word, README file, source code, etc.) depicting their work, and (3) Implementation and a demonstration of the project implementation. The following link: Example Project exemplifies a typical project outcome from one of my graduate courses and this link: Example Project2 one from my undergraduate level courses. All past and current projects are publicly accessible from u drive following the links that have the format: "http://my.fit.edy/~vkepuska/eceYYYY/Projects", where eceYYYY indicates the course number (e.g., ECE3553). Each project is assessed based on provided detailed instructions for the project requirements. This document resides in each corresponding class link under “Final Project Requirements document” as exemplified in the following link: http://my.fit.edu/~vkepuska/ece3551/Final%20Project%20Requirements.doc. Promotion Dossier The examination and quality of assessment of the project is conducted by providing each student with allocated at least 30min time slot to present his/her work. Large classes require 2 days of presentation times starting from 8:00 am-12:00 pm, and 1:00pm-6:00pm to complete the examination. It is worth noting that the enrollment process is fully automated based on the first serve basis. Each reserved time slot requires my formal approval for which I receive an automated e-mail notification. This application is www based and fully integrated into my web based u: drive interface. The following link provides an example of this system: http://my.fit.edu/~vkepuska/web/courses.php#ece3551-projects Note my teaching experience in addition to my early years at University of Prishtina, also was enriched during my graduate studies at Clemson University (1986-1990) where I taught (lectures and labs) the following courses: Digital Processing of Speech Signals, Digital Systems, Digital Circuit Design, Microprocessor Applications, Programming and Electronics.

Collaboration with Industry I strongly advocate and use teaching approach which bridges the gap between theory and practice. This approach has allowed me to establish a number of strategic partnerships with industry: ThinkEngine Networks (http://www.thinkengine.com), iCVn (http://www.iCVn.com), QTSI (http://www.qtsi.com), Knigh's Armament Company (http://www.knightarmco.com), PCB (http://www.pcb.com), BMW ([email protected]), Microsoft, Nterspec Technologies, LLC (www.nterspec.com) etc. More specifically with industry partnerships I have been able to support me and my students research as well as provide for expensive equipment. The current total amount of direct support from industry exceeds $250,000. Additional notable collaborations are listed below:  NIST, Speech Group - I have enrolled an FIT team (Arthur Kunkle and Dileep Koneru) in NIST sponsored evaluation effort, Rich Transcription Evaluation Project, with a goal to further advance speech recognition area. At a moment I have two graduate students actively involved in this project that if successful will bring significant attention to FIT. The goal of our participation is not only to use existing technologies but also to incorporate my inventions into existing systems (e.g., HTK and Sphinx) demonstrating their superiority over conventional methods.  BMW – Actively working with Dr. Joachim G. Taiber, BMW Group, Head of IT Research Office, Information Technology Research Center (ITRC), Greenville South Carolina. Promotion Dossier ([email protected]). The present BMW Car Inspection Application Demo  Tudor Klein and Microsoft - Working with Microsoft through my former Graduate Student, Tudor Klein, to establish an appropriate relationship to contribute development of their new-generation of speech recognition software. Contact information [email protected].

Text Book and Laboratory Material (2) Published or made significant contributions to a textbook in his/her field.

I have completed two chapters of an innovative Digital Signal Processing text book for undergraduates. I plan to complete the book proposal by end of 2009 and have it presented to publishers. The chapters are included in the Appendix A2. Initial idea for the book content was accepted by Prentice Hall. In addition developed Laboratory material will be expanded with most notable student projects to provide a basis for the text book (see ECE 3552 & 4553 Multifarious Systems 1 & 2 Laboratory Material, ECE 3551 & 3552 Microcomputer Systems 1 &2 Laboratory Material, as well as Example Project from ECE 3553). For the list of publications please consultResearch and Scholarly Activities section or my CV (Section III Appendix A1). Promotion Dossier

Advising Activities (3 & 5) Served as the major advisor for M.S. as well as Ph.D. graduates in own and in other academic departments.

As a major advisor I have graduated 1 PhD student, and 6 MS degree students with thesis option. Currently I advise 2 PhD students and 5 Master- degree students all with thesis option (non thesis option students are not listed nor counted). Note that I have served or serving as advisory committee member for additional 4 PhD Students and 4 MS non ECE students.

Major Advisor

Student Gradua Dissertation/Thesis Title: ting Year Tamas Kaza 2006 “ Communications Protocol for RF-based Wireless Indoor Localization Networks” P Al Ghamdy, Amin 2010 TBD h O. D Eljhani, Mohamed 2011 TBD M. Tudor Klein 2007 “Triple Scoring of Hidden Markov Models in Wake- Up-Word Speech Recognition” Tien-Hsiang Lo 2005 “ Analysis of Weighted-Sum of Line Spectrum Pair Method for Spectral Estimation” Elias Victor 2005 “ 1553 Avionics Bus Hardware Integration Into Expendable Launch Vehicle (ELV) Simulation Model” Za Hniang Za 2008 "A Study of Approaches for Microphone Array Signal Processing" Chih-Ti Shih 2009 "Use of Pitch and Energy of the Speech Signal for M Discrimination of 'Alerting' from 'Referential' Context S Raymond 2009 "Prosodic Features for Wake-Up-Word Speech Sastraputera Recognition" Arthur Kunkle 2010 "Recognition of Sequences" Pattarapong 2009 TBD Rojanasthien Ronald Ramdhan 2009 TBD Xerxes Beharry 2009 TBD Mohammed 2009 TBD Almeer Promotion Dossier Advisory Committee Member

Student Graduating Dissertation/Thesis Title Year

Michel 2007 “Image Fusion for Improved Perception” Ouendeno (ECE) Igor Lugach 2006 “ Effect of Accurate and Simplified Interactions modeling in a Null-Flux (MEA) Electromagnetic Levitation System on Performance of Multi-DOF Sliding Mode P Controller” h D Scott Meredith 2011 "Lightning Generated Electric and Magnetic (ECE) Fields: a methodology into the development of three models and their utilization in determining the currents induced within a three-wired tether" Mohammed ??? 2010 (ECE)

Chih-Ti Shih 2009 (ENM)

Patric Durland 2009 Examination: "Project Arcade" (SYS) M S Osama 2007 Non-Thesis Option Saraireh (ES) Rachna Vargiya 2004 “ Keyword Spotting Using Normalization of (CS) Posterior Probability Confidence Measures”

(4) Served as faculty representative (advisor) to student clubs, societies or organizations.

I typically advise 25-35 undergraduate students each year, and directly work with at least 2 junior and 2 senior design teams. I also serve as advisor to Chi Phi student society here at Florida Tech. In addition to my office hours I have an open-door policy and I am known for my availability to students.

Outside Funding for Curriculum Development & Laboratories

(8) Received funding from outside agencies or foundations for curriculum development, enhancing teaching laboratories, etc.

As indicated previously in Collaboration with Industry section I was able to leverage my collaborations with industry to secure funding for Promotion Dossier laboratory equipment as well as undergraduate and graduate student support. In addition to unique relationship with industry, I pride myself for (i) my heavy focus on undergraduate research that produced a wealth of outcomes over the past 5 years and (ii) for a major educational collaboration that I have contributed through collaborative work with industry as well as with my departmental colleague Dr. Anagnostopoulos. This collaboration is detailed in the next section under NSF Grants. Promotion Dossier

8* Research and Scholarly Activities

The term "research" is used in its broad sense of intellectual inquiry. Essentially, the term "research" is used interchangeably with the term "scholarly activities." Review briefly the highlights of your research contributions. Emphasize specific contributions to knowledge, but do not become overly technical. Review your current and future research plans. Review your research support history and future plans. List in reverse chronological order externally funded grants and contracts. Include for each the sponsoring agency or company, dates and period of support, number of students supported and amounts funded. Give a separate or contiguous list of projects internally funded or unfunded. List publications and contributions. List these publications in the following order or in chronological order indicating in the margin the appropriate category. Copies of some or all publications should be included in Appendix AIII. If too bulky, part or all of Appendix AIII may be separated from the main dossier.  Books and monographs  Articles in refereed journals and books  Articles in non-refereed journals or books  Articles in refereed journals or books in press  Articles in non-refereed journals or books in press  Articles in refereed journals or books submitted  Articles in non-refereed journals or books submitted  Conference presentations and whether the entire paper and/or the abstract only was reviewed.  Published technical reports.  Other publications such as Course Manuals, Guidebooks, etc. List and describe briefly any Disclosures of Inventions or resulting Patents. Provide a brief statement regarding the impact of these publications in the field of research. A recommended indicator of scholarly impact would be a review of the candidate’s publications citation rate. Include a statement of the ranking of these journals in the candidate’s research field. List invited lectures of special note during the last three years. The candidate should provide a brief statement on his/her interpretation of the role and success of his/her scholarly activities and discuss plans for future creative work and research. Comment on how you have developed yourself professionally in your discipline since your last promotion/appointment to Florida Tech. My most important research and educational contribution to Florida Tech, is my dedication to involving undergraduates in research. All my achievements with the students were done with undergraduate students or with graduate students that were raised from FIT undergraduate ranks (e.g., Tudor Klein, Chih-Ti Shih, Raymond Sastraputera, Sean Powers, Brandon Schmitt, Xerxes Beharry, Ronald Ramdhan, Raymond Sastraputera, Chris Helriegel, Pattarapong Rojanasthien). In particular, I pride myself for (i) my heavy focus on undergraduate research that produced a wealth of outcomes especially over the past 3 years, (ii) establishment of reputable collaborative partnership with industry, and (iii) for a major research and educational collaboration that I have achieved through collaborative work with Dr. Rodriguez (FGCU), Dr. Georgiopoulos, Dr. Fiore (UCF), Dr. Promotion Dossier Anagnostopoulos, Dr. Carstens, Dr. Converse (FIT), and other faculty at FIT and elsewhere; Dr. Gurbuz (ATR Japan), Dr. Ports (QTSI),.Dr. Liakopoulos and Mr. Paraskevakos (ICVN), etc. In addition to collaboration with academic institutions, the support for research that I have conducted since I have joined FIT comes from my industry partners and from government sponsored programs. My research activity draws on my past extensive experience in conducting cutting-edge Research and Development work for the top companies in the world (for the list please refer to the Summary of Accomplishments and the Brief History of the Candidate sections, as well as discussed below).

NSF Grants A number of important outcomes are the fruit of two major NSF projects (totaling $260,000). I am serving in a role of Co-PI but have a crucial role in its successful The first project, Project EMD-MLR, is a Phase- I (prototype) project. It is sponsored by NSF and supported through grant DUE-CCLI-0341601 of $99,996 under the Course, Curriculum and Laboratories Improvement (CCLI) program and the Educational Materials Development (EMD) track (see Section III). The project is a partnership of 3 additional institutions, namely, University of Central Florida (UCF; Orlando), Brevard Community College (BCC; Melbourne) and Seminole Community College (SCC; Oviedo). FIT is the lead organization and the remaining 3 institutions are sub-awarded. This proposal was one of the top 17% of approx. 800 Phase-I CCLI proposals submitted back in 2003 that received funding. The project started in May 2004 and is slated to end in April 2008. Project EMD-MLR is very ambitious in terms of goals. Primarily, its goal is to engage undergraduate students into research in the high-tech area of Machine Learning (ML), an area that is of multi-disciplinary nature and ever- developing. The project provides the opportunity to university seniors and sophomore, community college students to engage in research in a high quality student-mentor setting. Such privilege is typically reserved for graduate students only. The involvement is typically 2-semester long and students perform their research as their senior design or capstone project, either on an individual basis or as a member of a student team. Each student team closely interacts on a weekly basis with a project faculty and a graduate student. All project participants from all 4 institutions are meeting on a monthly basis to show their progress, share ideas and discuss issues as a community to learn from each other. This project, directed by Dr. Anagnostopoulos, was supported by 11 faculty (4 FIT, 4 UCF, 2 BCC, 1 SCC), an Industry Advisory Board of 8 scientists and engineers from the industry and the government (Boeing, Northrop-Grumman, NASA, etc.), as well as by an international Academic Advisory Board of 9 scholars from around the world (US, Spanish and Greek faculty). In its current lifespan the project has involved a total of 5 graduate Promotion Dossier students and 51 undergraduate students (22 FIT, 21 UCF, 5 BCC, 3 SCC) from the 4 institutions. The majority of the university students participating were juniors or seniors in Electrical Engineering, Computer Engineering and Computer Science, while the community college participants were sophomores primarily stemming from Computer Science related fields. The second project where I am serving in the capacity of Co-PI, see AMALTHEA REU Site, is also sponsored by NSF under the Research Experiences for Undergraduates (REU) program and grant IIS-REU-0647018 for $160,701 over a period of 3 years (2007-2010). It got awarded in March 2007 as a collaborative effort between FIT and UCF (total grant amount was $300,000) with FIT being the lead institution and with Dr. Anagnostopoulos as the program's Director (see Section III Supporting Documentation for Scholarly and Research Related Activities). The effort is also generously supported by matching funds through the FIT Provost's Office. Please note that the REU Site program is one of NSF's premier and esteemed programs for undergraduate education. My proposal was one of the 12 funded out of all proposals submitted to NSF's CISE division in 2006. In addition, I and my team were highly commended by our NSF review panelists for the extent of the documented research we have with undergraduate students. Also, according to historical records, the AMALTHEA program seems to be the 3rd REU Site proposal ever to be awarded to Florida Tech. Each year 10 Engineering or Science undergraduates are recruited for a research experience in the summer for 10 weeks (typically, from mid May to end of July) at the host universities (FIT & UCF). Its intellectual focus is again Machine Learning (ML) and its applications. The faculty and graduate students will educate the undergraduate program participants about cutting- edge ML technology and, subsequently, perform supervised research with them. The ultimate goal is to produce research results that directly impact the research area of ML and, finally, publish/present these results in technical journals and conferences. The program will pay for the students' travel, accommodations and per diem expenses via a highly competitive stipend. AMALTHEA is supported by a project staff of 5 faculty (2 FIT, 3 UCF), a network of 10 affiliate Universities around the nation and an Advisory Board of 6 researchers from the local industry and government sectors (Siemens, Harris, NASA, etc.).

Patents As of now, I consider my most significant scientific contribution to be the solution in the area of Speech Processing and Recognition. the invention solved a difficult problem for which there no other appropriate solution. The problem can be summarized as discrimination between a target word/phrase having a wake-up or alerting context (e.g., “Computer, start power-point presentation”) from that same word/phrase in a referential context (e.g., “My computer has a quad-core CPU.”). I have developed a revolutionary speech recognition technology (called Wake-Up-Word or WUW for short) that Promotion Dossier solves this problem. This solution can change how we can interact with computers. Furthermore, this solution can be applied to general speech recognition problem thus improving their accuracy over 1,500%-30,000% providing solutions that approach human performance. The solution is protected by my two US patents: ("Scoring and re-scoring dynamic time warping of speech" US # 7,085,717, and "Dynamic time warping using frequency distributed distance measures", US # 6,983,246) and presently patent application (September 15, 2009) "Exploiting Differences in Correlations for Modeled and Un-Modeled Sequences by Transforming Trained Model Topology in Sequence Recognition" AP# 61242569, EFS ID: 6076846 . Those first two patents although only issued recently, are referenced in by following patents:

US PTNO Title 7,437,291 Using partial information to improve dialog in automatic speech recognition systems 7,143,034 Dynamic time warping device for detecting a reference pattern having a smallest matching cost value with respect to a test pattern, and speech recognition apparatus using the same 7,085,717 Scoring and re-scoring dynamic time warping of speech 5,455,889 Labeling speech using context-dependent acoustic prototypes

Collaboration with Industry I strongly advocate and practice teaching approach that bridges the gap between theory and practice. This approach has allowed me to establish a number of strategic partnerships with industry: ThinkEngine Networks (http://www.thinkengine.com), iCVn (http://www.iCVn.com), QTSI (http://www.qtsi.com), PCB (http://www.pcb.com), Knigh's Armament Company (http://www.knightarmco.com), BMW, Microsoft, etc. As indicated previously, through industry partnerships I have been able to fund my research and support my students. As of November 2009, total amount of direct support from industry exceeds $250,000. For example, ThinkEngine Networks (http://www.thinkengine.com) supported my research in speech recognition for first 2.5 years at FIT (~$82000). For more information please consult my Résumé and/or contact a former senior Vice Presidents of Research: Geoffrey Parkhurst: [email protected] and Paul Gagne: paul@rpm- communications.com (detailed contact information also listed under references from industry section). Promotion Dossier In addition, through my industry collaborators, I have brought in equipment worth well over $60,000. In the ongoing collaboration with iCVn of Baltimore my team is designing a new hardware that will augment the Shinwoo money counting device with a scanner capable of reading serial numbers from any currency (e.g., US Dollars, UK Pounds, SW Franks, European Union Euros, etc.), configured by software that we are also developing. We have also re-designed and re-implemented their core application software that now connects to the Shinwoo device and communicates with it. As of October 2008, iCVn has already contributed over $20,000 worth of equipment and over $40,000 direct support for me and my students' (Sean Powers, Xerxes Beharry, Andrew Leslie Sweeny, Alex Roberts) research and development efforts. PCB, an internationally recognized corporation has donated over $5,000.00 worth of specialized industrial quality equipment consisting of high precision microphones and data acquisition equipment for microphone array research. In addition PCB is partnering with myself for NSF’s MRI research proposal to establish a largest microphone array laboratory in the south east. Contact information: Ray Rautenstrauch [email protected]. QTSI, a Cocoa Beach based company - During the first half of 2006 I have completed a very import pilot study for QTSI of Cocoa Beach utilizing my Wake-Up-Word Speech Recognition Technology to Seismic Signals. The achieved results from this study, according to professionals in that field, are the best compared to up-to-date currently published reports. For further information please contact Dr. Ken Ports [email protected], a senior Manager at QTSI and former colleague of ECE Department. I must note that If it was not for proprietary nature of the conducted research, a large number of papers could have been publishing just from this effort alone. Detailed contact information is also listed under references from industry section in . Additional notable collaborations are listed below:  NIST, Speech Group - I have enrolled an FIT team (Arthur Kunkle and Dileep Koneru) in NIST sponsored evaluation effort, Rich Transcription Evaluation Project, with a goal to further advance speech recognition area. At a moment I have two graduate students actively involved in this project that if successful will bring significant attention to FIT. The goal of our participation is not only to use existing technologies but also to incorporate my inventions into existing systems (e.g., HTK and Sphinx) demonstrating their superiority over conventional methods.  BMW – Actively working with Dr. Joachim G. Taiber, BMW Group, Head of IT Research Office, Information Technology Research Center (ITRC), Greenville South Carolina. Promotion Dossier  Tudor Klein and Microsoft - Working with Microsoft through my former Graduate Student, Tudor Klein, to establish an appropriate relationship to contribute development of their new-generation of speech recognition software. Contact information [email protected].

Software Application - PowerPoint Commander At the beginning of the year 2009 I will be launching a web site (http://VoiceKey.fit.edu) through which a 90 day free trial of the PowerPoint Commander - a voice activated Power Point presentation software application will be offered. This cross platform (Windows as well as Microsoft OS) application is the result of research and developed that I have done over the past 8 years. This application incorporates my Wake-Up-Word (WUW) Speech Recognizer. It enables users to control their power-point presentation program using voice only. The uniqueness of the application is the ability of the technology to distinguish a presentation speech from the speakers command. For example:  Presentation Speech: "Speech Processing requires application of short time analysis. The overall process is depicted in the block diagram presented in the next slide."  Command: "Computer! Go to Next Slide". Although speech recognition technology has been around for over 25 years, it has to be emphasized that this kind of accuracy performance required by this application has not been developed by any commercial or research institutions yet, and thus my WUW technology has a potential to revolutionize the way we communicate with computers.

Proposal Activities In 2008, I have submitted a $10-Million multi-institutional, collaborative Center of Excellence proposal, as a co-PI, to the Florida Board of Governors. The proposal ended up being among the top 10 proposals in scientific merit as judged by the prestigious Oak Ridge Associated Universities reviewers (ORAU: Top 10 in Scientific Review Ranking). My contribution as judged by my pears was critical to the scientific merit ranking of the proposal (Dr. Rodriguez). Up to date I have submitted 15 proposals to NSF: 9 of which I am PD/PI. The total worth of these research projects is/was $4,789,708. Two (2) projects were awarded (totaling $260,000) and 1 is pending ($1,198,728). In addition, I have submitted 3 proposals to Rockwell Collins, State of Florida and Lindberg Ann Foundation as PI/Co-PI totaling $2,156,012. A plethora of Promotion Dossier additional outcomes are the fruit of two major projects (totaling $260,000): (1) EMD-MLR project sponsored by NSF and supported through grant DUE- CCLI-0341601 of $99,996 under the Course, Curriculum and Laboratories Improvement (CCLI) program and the Educational Materials Development (EMD) track, and (2) AMALTHEA project (AMALTHEA REU Site) also sponsored by NSF under the Research Experiences for Undergraduates (REU) program and grant IIS-REU-0647018 for $160,701 over a period of 3 years (2007-2010) and played a crucial role in its successful execution as Co- PI. For additional details please consult List of Proposals section next.

List of Proposals Up-to-date, I have submitted proposals to NSF (15), Florida Board of Governors (1), SBIR-STTR (2), and a numerous of other proposals (not listed here); internal (e.g., NSF-MRI), earmarked, or as a consulting collaborator with a partnering organizations. As of November 2008, the total amount of requested funding where I am PI/PD or Co-PI exceeds $16 mil as shown in the table below. Succinctly put, I have generated or I have been involved in generation of on average at least 3.3 proposals per year.

Agency Title Requested Funding Florida FGCU+FIT+UCF Collaboration Software Center of Board of Excellence: uCollaborator™: Research, Development and Governors Commercialization of Ubiquitous Collaboration Technologies $10,000,000 NSF-IIS RI:HCC:Medium:RUI: uC: Ubiquitous Collaboration Platform for Multimodal Team Interaction Support $698,728 NSF-EEC uC: Ubiquitous Collaboration Innovations in Engineering Education Infrastructure $499,297 NSF-IIS RI:HCC:Small:RUI: Investigation of Alerting and $491,517 Referential Context in Human-Machine Interaction from Speech, Language and Visual Speech NSF- MRI: Acquisition of a Massive Sensor Network System ECCS for Research and Development of Automatic Methods and Algorithms for Analysis of Sensors' Signals $243,572 NSF-DUE Development of a Comprehensive Curriculum & Learning Material for Embedded Digital Signal Processing Multimedia Applications $149,947 NSF-IIS REU Sites: Collaborative Research: Advances of Machine Learning in Theory & Applications (AMALTHEA) $160,701 Promotion Dossier NSF-DUE Collaborative Research: Building a Community of Learners & Scholars to develop, assess and disseminate Educational Materials & Teaching Practices in Machine Learning $249,963 NSF-DUE Computer Engineering Undergraduate Integrated Embedded Systems Curriculum $210,336 NSF-IIS Wake-Up-Word Integrated Voice Activated Response System $597,238 NSF-CNS CRCD/EI: Integrating Research in Education: Machine Learning in Emerging Application Areas $599,558 NSF-IIS A Text Compression Competition $52,160 NSF-DUE THE ENGINEERING CURRICULUM FOR 2020: Values, Variability, Improvement and Knowledge $99,607 NSF-DUE PROJECT EMD-MLR: Educational Materials Development through the Integration of Machine Learning Research into the Senior Design Projects $99,996 NSF-CNS INTEGRATING EMBEDDED DESIGN PRINCIPLES THROUGHOUT THE ENGINEERING CURRICULUM: THE TOP-DOWN APPROACH $73,200 NSF-CCF Integrated Wireless Common Protocol $339,744 NSF-IIS Sensor Networks of Clustered Smart Microphone Arrays Using Robust Key Word Recognition for Monitoring and Security Applications $619,489 NSF-IIS PROTOCOL OPTIMIZATION IN WIRELESS SENSOR NETWORKS $339,744 NIJ-SBIR Truly Voice Activated Man-Machine Interface via Wake-Up- Word Recognition $450,000 DOD- WAKE-UP-WORD BASED SPEECH RECOGNITION NAVY SYSTEM FOR TRULY VOICE-ACTIVATED AIR- SBIR TRAFFIC CONTROL APPLICATION $300,000 Rockwell Embedded Systems Laboratory for 2020 Curriculum Collins $22,000 Lindbergh Reducing Fuel Consumption by Reducing the Time Required Foundatio for Airplane Flight-Plan Configuration and Data Entry with n Wake-Up-Word Speech Recognition Technology $10,559

Total: $16,307,355

Patents Dynamic Time Warping (DTW) Using Frequency Distributed Distance Measures: 6983246, January 3, 2006. Scoring and Rescoring Dynamic Time Warping of Speech: 7085717, April 1, 2006. Promotion Dossier Exploiting Differences in Correlations for Modeled and Un-Modeled Sequences by Transforming Trained Model Topology in Sequence Recognition: Patent Application, AP# 61242569, EFS ID: 6076846, September 2009.

Journal Publications Këpuska, V., & Rojanasthien, P. (2009). Forced Alignment using Microsoft SAPI and HTK for Prosodic Analysis of Sentinel Words. Elsevier's Computer Speech and Language, Submitted December 2009 Këpuska, V., & Sastraputera, R. (2009). Discrimination of Sentinel Word Contexts using Prosodic Features. Speech Communication, Submitted November 2009 Rodriguez, W., Fiore, S., De Welde, K., Carstens, D., Këpuska, V. (2009). Ubiquitous Collaboration (uC) Learning. Ubiquitous Learning, International Journal, Submitted. November 2009 Këpuska, V., Gurbuz, S., Rodriguez, W., Fiore, S., Carstens, D., Converse, P., Metcalf, D. (2009). uC: Ubiquitous Collaboration Platform for Multimodal Team Interaction Support, Submitted to Journal of International Technology and Information Management (IJTIM), Invited Paper Special Issue on Knowledge Management and Business Intelligence Këpuska, V., & Klein, T. (2008). On Wake-Up-Word Speech Recogntion Task, Technology, and Evaluation Results against HTK and Microsoft SDK 5.1. To appear in Journal of Nonlinear Analysis, Theory, Methods & Applications. Këpuska, V. and Mason. S., (1995). A Neural Network Approach to Signalized Point Recognition in Aerial Photographs, Photogrammetric Engineering & Remote Sensing, Vol. 61, No. 7, pp. 917-925, July 1995. Mason, S. and Këpuska, V., (1992). CONSENS: An Expert System for Photogrammetric Network Design, Allgemaine Vermessungs Nachrichten, pp. 384-393, September 1992.

Conference Publications Këpuska, V., & Shih, C. (2009). Prosodic Analysis of Alerting and Referential Contexts of Sentinel Words. Internatioanl Conference of Acousitc Speech and Signal Processing (ICASSP'10), Submitted November 2009 Anagnostopoulos, G.C., Georgiopoulos, M., Kepuska, V., Morrison-Shetlar, A., Lancey, P., Krist, P., and Crouse, T. (2009). The AMALTHEA REU Program: Activities, Experiences & Outcomes of a Promotion Dossier Collaborative Summer Research Experience in Machine Learning, Proceedings of the American Society of Engineering Education (ASEE) 2009 Annual Conference and Exposition (ASEE 2009), Austin, Texas, June 14 - 17, 2009. Këpuska, V., & Klein, T. (2008). On Wake-Up-Word Speech Recogntion Task, Technology, and Evaluation Results against HTK and Microsoft SDK 5.1. Invited Paper: World Congress on Nonlinear Analysts, Orlando 2008, To appear in Journal of Nonlinear Analysis, Theory, Methods & Applications. Beharry, X., Këpuska, V., Powers, S., Ramdhan, R., Rojanasthien, P., Weerasooriya, A., (2008). Patriot Robotic System Design, Florida Conference on Recent Advances in Robotics, FCRAR 2008 Këpuska, V., Carstens, D. S., & Wallace, R. (2006). Leading and Trailing Silence in Wake-Up-Word Speech Recognition, Proceedings of the International Conference: Industry, Engineering & Management Systems 2006, Cocoa Beach, FL., 259-266. Këpuska V., (2006). Wake-Up-Word Application for First Responder Communication Enhancement, SPIE, Orlando, 2006. Këpuska V., Rogers N., Patel M., (2006). A MATLAB Tool for Speech Analysis, Processing and Recognition: SAR-LAB, ASEE, Chicago, 2006. (Best Paper Award Nomination) Kasza T., Shahsavari M., Këpuska V., Chen Ch., (2006). Communications Protocol for RF-based Indoor Wireless Localization Systems, SPIE, Orlando, 2006. Anagnostopoulos G., Georgiopoulos M., Ports K., Richie S., White M., Këpuska V., Chan P. K., Wu A., Kysilka M., (2006). Engaging Undergraduate Students in Machine Learning Research: Progress, Experiences and Achievements of Project EMD-MLR, Proceedings of the ASEE 2006 Annual Conference and Exposition, June 18-21, Chicago, Illinois. Anagnostopoulos G., Georgiopoulos M., Ports K., Richie S., Cardinale N., White M., Këpuska V., Chan P., Wu A., Kysilka M., (2005). Project EMD-MLR: Educational Material Development and Research in Machine Learning for Undergraduate Students, Session 3232, Proceedings of the ASEE 2005 Annual Conference and Exposition, June 12-15, Portland, Oregon. Mason, S. and Këpuska, V., (1992). On the Representation of Close-Range Network Design Knowledge, XVII ISPRS Congress, Washington D.C., August 1992. Këpuska, V. and Mason, S., (1991). Automatic Signalized Point Recognition with Feed-Forward Neural Network, IEE Second International conference on Artificial Neural Networks, Bournemouth, U.K., November, 1991. Promotion Dossier Mason, S., Beyer, H., and Këpuska, V., (1991). An AI-based Photogrammetric Network Design System, First Australian Photogrammetric Conference, University of Newcastle, Australia, November 1991. Këpuska, V. and Mason, S., (1991). Artificial Neural Network Approach to Signalized Point Recognition in Aerial Photographs, First Australian Photogrammetric Conference, University of Newcastle, Australia, November 1991. Këpuska, V., Beyer, H. and Mason, S., (1991). Artificial Neural Networks for Calibration of CCD-Cameras, Workshop on Industrial Applications of Neural Networks, Ascona, Switzerland, September 1991. Këpuska, V. and Gowdy, J., (1990). On the Effect of Topological Structure of the Kohonen Network on the Performance of the Hierarchical two Layered Isolated Word Recognition System, IEEE Southeastcon Symposium, New Orleans, April 1990. Këpuska, V. and Gowdy, J., (1989). Investigation of Phonemic Context in Speech using Self-Organizing Feature Maps, IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing - ICASSP’89, Glasgow, Scotland, May 1989. Këpuska, V. and Gowdy, J., (1989). Phonemic Speech Recognition Based on Neural Network, IEEE Southeastcon Symposium, Columbia, April 1989. Këpuska, V. and Gowdy, J., (1988). The Kohonen Net for Speaker Dependent Isolated Word Recognition, IEEE Southeastern Symposium on Systems Theory, UNCC Charlotte, March 1988. Këpuska, V. and Gowdy, J., (1987). Evaluation of Digital Signal Processing Chips for Speech Processing Applications, IEEE Southeastern Symposium on Systems Theory, Clemson University, Clemson, March 1987. Këpuska, V. and Gacaferri, J., (1979). The Determination of the Polynomial Coefficients for Approximation of the EKG with Computer, (in Serbo-Croatian), Symposium JUREMA, Zagreb 1979.

Public Technical Reports Këpuska, V. and Mason. S., (1992) NFP23: Design and Analysis of Spatial Image Sequences, Wissentsschaflicher Bericht zum Schweizerischer Nationalfonds zer Förderung der Wissentsschaftlicher Forschung, 1992. Këpuska, V. and Mason, S., (1992) Design and Analysis of Spatial Image Sequences, NFP 23 Third Annual Status Report, Bern, July 6, 1992. Promotion Dossier Këpuska, V. and Mason. S., (1991) NFP23: Design and Analysis of Spatial Image Sequences, Wissentsschaflicher Bericht zum Schweizerischer Nationalfonds zer Förderung der Wissentsschaftlicher Forschung, 1991. Këpuska, V. and Mason, S., (1991) Design and Analysis of Spatial Image Sequences, NFP 23 Second Annual Status Report, Bern, June 5, 1992. Mason, S. and Këpuska, V.,(1991) NFP 23: Design and Analysis of Spatial Image Sequences (Project Summary), SGAICO Newsletter, Swiss Group for Artificial Intelligence and Cognitive Science, 1991. Promotion Dossier

9* Service Activities

Provide a statement of the candidate’s Department and University service for at least the last three years. List in reverse chronological order all significant University, College/School, and Department/Program committee service. Identify your role on each committee and explain the purpose of the committee and explain the purpose of the committee if not obvious. List committee service for other Universities and national or regional educational or professional committees (e.g., review committees, accreditation committees, technical societies, etc.). Provide a statement of the nature and impact of any unremunerated community service. uCollaborator Coalition As a result of Dr. Rodriguez (FGCU) and my efforts, we have created the uCollaborator Coalition of Excellence (uCE, pronounced "you see") gathering researchers from Florida Gulf Coast University, Florida Institute of Technology and University of Central Florida (Institute for Simulation and Training) and industrial partners (further details provided in the following link www.ucollaborator.com). Currently, uCE is engaging in research, development, and commercialization of a new breed of ubiquitous collaboration technologies. And, recently, the coalition has submitted a couple of grant proposals for developing an open-platform to connect the physical and virtual worlds both synchronously (same time) and asynchronously (anytime, anywhere). I took the lead on one of them (NSF- IIS 905145: RI:HCC:Medium:RUI: uC: Ubiquitous Collaboration Platform for Multimodal Team Interaction Support).

Conferences and Related Activities During 2008/2009 year I have actively participated in NIST RT Evaluation. This activity culminated with:  Organization and Hosting of the NIST RT 2009 Workshop.  Participation in the evaluation of the RT technologies that was developed at FIT  Securing of NIST MARK III 64 microphone array for R&D and data collection. The review of the quality of organization of the event is provided under NIST Rich Transcription Evaluation Workshop 2009 under Appendix A4. Supporting Documentation for Service and Related Activities In 2004 & 2005 I and Dr. Marius Silaghi have proposed and introduced a Special Speech Processing and Recognition track in FLAIRS. Promotion Dossier This task entailed hosting the www site with the information about the new track, collecting the papers, recruiting reviewers, organizing, conducting and managing the peer review process, and notifying the conference chair of the final list of accepted papers. In addition I have also served as a session chair to both of those sessions. In total I have served as char in 3 conferences (FLAIRS 2004 & 2005) as well as ASEE 2006. In ASEE I was invited to serve as a session chair. In addition, my paper also was nominated for best paper award out of total of 9 nominated papers - Këpuska V., Rogers N., Patel M., (2006). A MATLAB Tool for Speech Analysis, Processing and Recognition: SAR-LAB, ASEE, Chicago, 2006. (Best Paper Award Nomination).

Reviewing I have served as a professional reviewer for the: Wiley and Sons book “Speech and Audio Signal Processing: Processing and Perception of Speech and Music”, by Gold, Morgan. In addition I have served as reviewer for Elsevier Journals Speech Communication, Neural Networks, Nonlinear Analysis Theory and Methods, IEEE Transactions on Neural Networks (2007), ACM Symposium on Applied Computing – NLSP (2008), FLAIRS (2005 and 2006); First Conference on Information Technology and Engineering Sciences, Kosova (2007). Also, I have served as Reviewer for Academic Advancement of Dr. Dimitrios Charalampidis - ECE department of University of New Orleans. In the past, prior to joining FIT I have often served as reviewer for the International Journal of Speech Technology, IEEE ICASSP, ICSLP.

Advising I typically advise 25-35 undergraduate students each year, and directly work with at least 2 junior and senior design teams most of whom distinguished by their accomplishments:  Best Junior Design 2007 - Visual Audio - (Brandon Schmitt).  Greatest Commercial Potential - "Smart Room" Senior Design 2008 (Matt Hopkins, David Herndon, Patrick Marinelli). I also serve as advisor to Chi Phi student society here at Florida Tech. The Chi Phi Fraternity was awarded the Dr. Thomas Gehring Award for Chapter Excellence in 2007.

Committees Additional service activities include representing ECE department in FIT's Graduate Curriculum Committee (2003-2005). Served as member of Department Head Search Committee (2007) as well as currently (2008-2009). Promotion Dossier Serving in ECE department's ABET and Curriculum Committee. In addition as the only Computer Engineering Faculty with a Computer Engineering Degree I advice directly my Department Head in all matters regarding to Computer Engineering Curriculum.

Outreach My activities contributed to university's outreach efforts through AMALTHEA and EMD-MLR; NSF funded projects; I have represented FIT in Harris Engineering Week several times (2004-2008), LASER DAY (2005- 2007) and personal presentations at BCC, Melbourne L.B. Johnson Middle School, Cocoa Beach High School. Finally I am serving as a judge in science fair for Central Brevard Catholic Homeschool Group (2007, 2008, 2009) (e- mail: [email protected]).

CBD Board of Directors Since 2000, I served as a member of Board of Directors for a non- governmental human-rights organization "Center For Balkan Development". For more information please see http://www.friendsofbosnia.org/ who_board.html.

Recruiting Students Often I interview potential undergraduate students considering FIT as their undergraduate institution. Example of thankful response of a parent of a perspective student is attached: Parent E-Mail of Potential Student Promotion Dossier Promotion Dossier

SECTION III APPENDIXES

Table of Contents

APPENDIX A1

Këpuska Page A.56 Appendix A1

10* A1. Résumé

OBJECTIVE:

To make a significant contribution in advancing Human - Machine Interaction and Communication. My interests cover areas of Speech Recognition, Text to Speech, Speaker Identification - Biometrics and Telematics, Digital Signal Processing, Adaptive Filtering, Pattern Recognition, Neural Networks, Language Modeling, etc.

EDUCATION:

1990 Ph.D. Computer Engineering. Clemson University. Dissertation: Artificial Neural Networks for Speech Recognition Applications Advisor: John N. Gowdy

1986 M.S. Computer Engineering. Clemson University Advisor: John N. Gowdy

1981 Dipl. Eng. (B.S.) Electrical Engineering. University of Prishtina Thesis: The use of the Analog Computers for Simulation and Automatic Control Advisor: Abdurrahman Grapci

1976 Diploma Mathematical Gymnasium. Thesis Experimental Methods for Measurements of the Speed of Light Advisor: Skender Skenderi

FELLOWSHIPS AND HONORS

2009 - 2010 Kerry Bruce Clark Teacher Award

1984 – 1985 Fulbright Fellow

1987 – 1988 Harris Fellow

1977 – 1979 Univeristy of Prishtina Fellow

Këpuska Page A1.57 Appendix A1

EMPLOYMENT:

2003 -  Florida Institute of Technology, Electrical and Computer Engineering – Present Associate Professor:  Courses Taught: Graduate: 1. Speech Processing – ECE 5525 2. Speech Recognition – ECE 5526 3. Search and Decoding in Speech Recognition – ECE 5527 4. Computer Networks 2 – ECE 5535 5. Digital System Design 1 – ECE 5571 6. Digital System Design 2 – ECE 5572 Undergraduate: 7. Hardware Software Integration – ECE 2552 8. Signal and Systems – ECE 3222 9. Digital State Machines – ECE 3541 10. Microcomputer Systems 1 – ECE 3551 11. Microcomputer Systems 2 – ECE 3552 12. Multifarious Systems 1 – ECE 3553 13. Multifarious Systems 2 – ECE 4553 14. Computer Architecture – ECE 4551 15. Electric and Electronic Circuits – ECE 4991  AWARDS:  Kerry Bruce Clark Teacher, 2009-2010  UML-ADI Assistive Device Competition, June 2005 Lowell MA, First Place. Developed and Ported Wiener Based Noise Removal Algorithm to Analog Devices ADDS 21161 DSP.  NSF Proposals – PI/PD 1. MRI: Acquisition of a Massive Sensor Network System for Research and Development of Automatic Methods and Algorithms for Analysis of Sensors' Signals, ECCS 2. RI:HCC:Small:RUI: Investigation of Alerting and Referential Context in Human-Machine Interaction from Speech, Language and Visual Speech, IIS 3. RI: Medium: Colaborative Research: RUI: uC: Ubiquitous Collaboration Platform for Multimodal Team Interaction Support, IIS 4. uC: Ubiquitous Collaboration Platform for Multimodal Team Communication & Experimentation” IIE 6836191 5. Development of a Comprehensive Curriculum & Learning

Këpuska Page A1.58 Appendix A1 Material for Embedded Digital Signal Processing Multimedia Applications DUE 0736857 6. Computer Engineering Undergraduate Integrated Embedded Systems Curriculum 7. Wake-Up-Word Voice Activated Response System – IIS 8. A Text Compression Competition – IIS 9. Computer Engineering Undergraduate Integrated Embedded Systems Curriculum - DUE 10. Integrated Wireless Common Protocol - CCF 11. Protocol Optimization in Wireless Sensor Networks – CCF 12. Sensor Networks of Clustered Smart Microphone Arrays Using Robust Key Word Recognition for Monitoring and Security Applications - ECS  NSF Proposal – Co-PI 1. Pending: Collaborative Research: REU Site: Advances of Machine Learning in Theory & Applications (AMALTHEA) 2. Pending: Collaborative Research: RET Site: Research Experiences for Teachers focused on Applications of ImagEs and SiGnals In High Schools (AEGIS) 3. uC: Ubiquitous Collaboration Innovations in Engineering Education Infrastructure - EEC

4. PROJECT AMATHEA – REU: Collaborative Research: Advances of Machine Learning in Theory & Applications (AMALTHEA) 5. PROJECT EMD-MLR: Educational Materials Development through the Integration of Machine Learning Research into the Senior Design Projects 6. Integrating Research in Education: Machine Learning in Emerging Application Areas – CNS 7. The Engineering Curriculum for 2020: Values, Variability, Improvement and Knowledge – EEC 8. Integrating Embedded Design Principles Throughout the Engineering Curriculum: The Top-Down Approach - DUE

 CS Dept. Curriculum Series Presentation: 1. September 2005, “Wake-Up-Word Speech Recognition: A Missing Link toward Natural Language Understanding”. 2. February 2009, "Toward Natural Understanding of Speech",  Harris Engineering Week: 2004, 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009.

2001 -  Speech Recognition Scientist - ThinkEngine Networks, Inc., 175 Maple 2003 Street, Marlborough, MA 01745. USA.  Invented, Designed and Developed unique solution to “Wake-Up-Word” or “OnWord™” Spotting Technology. Key Word Spotting entails recognition of a specific word/phrase uttered in isolation or in a context of a continuous speech. Currently this technology is not as widely used as other Speech

Këpuska Page A1.59 Appendix A1 Recognition Applications/Tasks because of poor performance of Speech Recognition Systems offering such technology commercially - Nuance, SpeechWorks, Philips, Conversay, ART, etc., or as a research tool, that is speech recognition technologies of primarily research and development institutions such as – Byblos (BBN), Sphinx (CMU), HTK Speech Recognition Tool Kit (Cambridge University, Entropic and Microsoft), etc. Furthermore, all those systems require computer systems with powerful CPU’s (~1.5 GHz Pentiums) with large memory (512 Mbytes RAM) with Speech Recognition process itself requiring tens of hundreds of Mbytes for this feature alone to even run in real time. Additional advantage of the developed system is that it is designed also to run on a Fixed Point DSP, requiring less than 36.2 Kbytes of program memory space and 2 Kbytes for Model space, consuming less 2 Million Cycles per Second on a TI C62xx. 1* Inventor of 3 Patented Solutions – Patent Pending: . Voice Activity Detection Based on Cepstral Features. . Dynamic Time Warping (DTW) Matching using Reverse Ordered Feature Vectors. . Rescoring using Distribution Distortion Measurements of Dynamic Time Warping Match. 2* Working on Generalized scoring using Reversed and Normal Ordered Features for any Pattern Matching Method (e.g, DTW, HMM) to be filed for patent. 3* Designed and Assisted in Developed of Voice Data Collection System - necessary for research, development, testing and evaluation of the Key Word Recognition System. 4* Performed and Managed 2 data collections over various calling environments (noisy, quiet, public, car, etc.) using various calling devices (cellular, landline, speaker phone. Created 2 Corpora from the recorded data. Those Corpora are used for: . Building Models of a particular Key Word . Testing and Evaluation of the System, and . Research, Development, and Refinement of Key Word Recognition System, 5* Transcribed and/or Supervised transcription process of recorded data. Set up conventions and standards so that all the tools to be developed that use data of created Corpora comply with a clear set of standards. 6* Converted other (CallHome and PhoneBook) Corpora to this set of standards for easy and consistent use. 7* Directed and Supervised Code Conversion and Porting from Floating Point to Fixed Point of Key Word Spotting Technology. 8* Developed Automated Process using combination of perl scripts and perl configuration files controlling various parameters affecting each step of the complex process of: . Generating Features from a Voice Data Corpus, . Building a Model of a Key Word (e.g., “Operator”, “Help”, “MapQuest”, “Verizon”, etc.) from the features, . Using built Model to test and evaluate Key Word Recognition System, Këpuska Page A1.60 Appendix A1

. Generating Performance Plots, Charts and Graphs. Those scripts use numerous executables, gnuplot – a graph plotting tool, as well as other perl scripts. End result of this process is automatic generation of number of plots, charts, and graphs that depict performance of the system for easy evaluation and comparison. 9* Trained and Supervised a DSP engineer to port, test and evaluate Key Word Technology. 10* Worked with Application Developers to integrate Key Word Spotting Technology into a viable Demo and potentially viable product. 11* Wrote Technical Document and Manual for this Technology. 12* Consulted CTO in decision making process regarding Speech Recognition, Text to Speech, as well as Key Words Spotting Technologies. 1999 –  Speech Recognition Scientist – SpeechWorks International, Inc., Product 2001 Group, 695 Atlantic Ave., Boston, MA 02111. USA. 13* Developed Noise Compensation Algorithm to increase recognition robustness against Noise and Channel varying characteristics. 14* Conducted Study of Wireless/Cellular vs. Wireline/Landline signal differences and their effect on recognition performance. 15* Developed Nonlinear Front End Signal Processing. 16* Performed Comparative Studies of various Speech Recognition Technologies (e.g., AT&T, NUANCE, SPEECHWORKS recognizers). 17* Developed algorithms to investigate various features (confidence score, acoustic score, etc.) and their optimal use for combining N-best lists produced by different features (mfcc, lpc, etc.) and different recognizers (segmental, HMM, Watson). Combining algorithm achieved significant error reduction as compared to the best. 18* Developed diphone clustering for HMM models to minimize model size. 19* Involved in re-alignment of acoustic segments for Text to Speech (TTS) model building data. Developed frame work for modular expansion and refinement of re-alignment process using perl scripts combined with perl configuration files. Implemented various heuristic rules to improve alignments generated by the Speech Recognizer to better fit TTS. 20* Developed data collection program for Dialogic JCT board that supports CSP. Developed, Run, Digested, Processed, “Call Environment Data Collection” using this application.

1997 -  Scientist - GTE, BBN Technologies, Speech Solutions Group, 70 Fawcett 1999 St., Cambridge, MA 02138. USA. 21* Compiled and Analyzed BYBLOS (research speech recognition technology) and BBN HARK (commercial technology) system differences; Analyzed possible BYBLOS technologies for porting into BBN HARK; Developed and Coded Voice Model Filter that loads BYBLOS and/or BBN HARK training files and converts them into a

Këpuska Page A1.61 Appendix A1 new format files in compliance to designed specifications; Ran various tests (BYBLOS and BBN HARK) for Continuous Densities BBN HARK for benchmarking. 22* Peer reviewer for Speech Communication Journal.

1993 -  Speech Scientist – Voice Processing Corporation/Voice Control Systems, 1997 Advanced Technology Development Group, One Main Street, MA 02142. USA. 23* Enhanced the performance of existing Front End of Speech Recognition System, implemented in VPro line of products, by designing a non-linear smoothing algorithm based on median filtering. 24* Developed and Implemented Dynamic Features that augmented existing Front End Features. 25* Developed a universal preprocessing module of the Front End that enables run-time front-end configuration, decompression, and sample- rate transformations of the original wave file. 26* Performed numerous tests that provided critical insights into enhancement and debugging of VProFlex Technology. 27* Invented, Developed and Integrated a very efficient novel Code Book Search strategy (internally named Fickle Search). 28* Compiled a condensed Internal Report of the Literature Review Study on different ways to perform fast FFT’s of a real valued sequence. 29* Developed, Tested, and Integrated Split Radix FFT algorithm. The function can handle any power of 2 Real Valued FFT’s. 30* Modified Front End to take advantage of higher FFT size and increased frequency resolution: 1* Analyzed the conflicting effect of window size and type (higher frequency resolution causing break down of enhancement due to harmonics, 2* Analyzed several possible modifications of enhancement algorithm to accommodate higher frequency resolution, and 3* Proposed elimination of pitch harmonics from the spectrum with Homomorphic filtering or LPC - based Spectrum. 31* Implemented LPC based spectrum integrating it with existing Spectral Enhancement module of the Front End. 32* Initiated the study toward enhanced composition of boundary and internal acoustic phonemic features. 33* Invented, Developed, Ported, and extensively Tested a novel Noise Compensation with Speech Enhancement Algorithm. Also invented several integration strategies that take further advantage of the algorithm through a better interaction of the Front End with API. that take advantage of calibration when feasible. Default mode of operation is fully unsupervised in real-time. 34* Developed and ANN software tool currently supporting five

Këpuska Page A1.62 Appendix A1 different feed-forward back-propagation type of learning. 35* Developed a Pitch Tracking Algorithm based on enhanced Super- Resolution Pitch Determination Algorithm.

1990 – 1993  Post-Doctoral Research Associate - Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, IGP, ETH-Hönggerberg, CH-8093 Zürich, Switzerland.  Swiss National Science Foundation Research Project in Image Understanding - Design and Analysis of Spatial Image Sequences

1985 – 1990  Teaching Assistant – Electrical and Computer Engineering Department. Clemson University.  Digital Processing of the Speech Signals, Digital Systems, Digital Circuit Design and Microprocessor Applications, Electronics, Programming.

1987 - 1990  Consultant - Engineering Research and Computer Services Department, Clemson University, Electrical and Computer Engineering Department, Clemson, SC 29634-0915. USA. 36* Design and Development of a database system for processing of the expenditures of the College of Engineering, Clemson University. 37* Design and Development of a database system prototype for automation of: 4* Management of the repair and maintenance orders, 5* Task allocation and duty assignment, 6* Time-table management of the assigned personnel, and 7* Generation of relevant statistical data.

1985 -  Software Engineer - Keiltronix: Textile Control Systems Inc. 2910 1986 Horseshoe Lane, P.O. Box 1923, Charlotte, NC 28219. Summer  Developed software for polling and analyzing data from peripheral Këpuska Page A1.63 Appendix A1 Job machine controllers. Developed software for graphical display of status of a manufacturing dying process in real-time. 38* Development of Software Package using REGIS as a low-level software tool for dynamic display of the state of technological process in real-time.

1981 -  Assistant Lecturer - Electrical Engineering Faculty, University of 1984 Prishtina, Republic of Kosova.  Taught courses in Control Theory, Systems Theory, Algorithms, Digital Communications, Boolean Algebra, Digital Systems, and Programming.  Contributed in the publishing of the first Automatic Control Theory text book in Albanian Language.  Key member of the commission that prepared a detailed proposal for Advancement of Curricula of Electrical and Electronics Engineering Faculty.

COMPUTER EXPERIENCE:

Languages & Revision C/C++, Fortran, Pascal, perl, awk, html, Prolog, Lisp, Control PLM86, Assembler, RCS, CVS, ClearCase.

Operating Systems Unix, VMS, RSX 11M/PLUS 2, Windows NT, MS-DOS, VOS, MVS, OpenWindows, OpenStep. CRAY Y, FPS-T20, NAS XL60/VS. Platforms IBM 370/3081, VAX 8850, 11/780, PDP 11/23. SunSparc’s, NeXT, IBM-PC’s, Mac’s, DSP Sona-Graph 5500

PATENTS:

 Exploiting Differences in Correlations for Modeled and Un-Modeled Sequences by Transforming Trained Model Topology in Sequence Recognition, EFS ID: 6076846, AP#: 61242569, September 2009, Patent Pending.  Dynamic Time Warping (DTW) Using Frequency Distributed Distance Measures: 6983246, January 3, 2006.  Scoring and Rescoring Dynamic Time Warping of Speech: 7085717, April 1, 2006.

JOURNAL PUBLICATIONS:

39* Këpuska, V., & Rojanasthien, P. (2009). Forced Alignment using Microsoft SAPI and HTK for Prosodic Analysis of Sentinel Words. Elsevier's Computer Speech and Language, Submitted December 2009

40* Këpuska, V., & Sastraputera, R. (2009). Discrimination of Sentinel Word Contexts using Prosodic Features. Speech Communication, Submitted November 2009

Këpuska Page A1.64 Appendix A1 41* Rodriguez, W., Fiore, S., De Welde, K., Carstens, D., Këpuska, V. (2009). Ubiquitous Collaboration (uC) Learning. Ubiquitous Learning, International Journal, Submitted. November 2009

42* Këpuska, V., Gurbuz, S., Rodriguez, W., Fiore, S., Carstens, D., Converse, P., Metcalf, D. (2009). uC: Ubiquitous Collaboration Platform for Multimodal Team Interaction Support, Submitted to Journal of International Technology and Information Management (IJTIM), Invited Paper Special Issue on Knowledge Management and Business Intelligence

43* Këpuska, V., & Klein, T. (2008). On Wake-Up-Word Speech Recogntion Task, Technology, and Evaluation Results against HTK and Microsoft SDK 5.1. To appear in Journal of Nonlinear Analysis, Theory, Methods & Applications. 44* Këpuska, V. and Mason. S., (1995). A Neural Network Approach to Signalized Point Recognition in Aerial Photographs, Photogrammetric Engineering & Remote Sensing, Vol. 61, No. 7, pp. 917-925, July 1995. 45* Mason, S. and Këpuska, V., (1992). CONSENS: An Expert System for Photogrammetric Network Design, Allgemaine Vermessungs Nachrichten, pp. 384-393, September 1992.

CONFERENCE PUBLICATIONS:

46* Këpuska, V., & Shih, C. (2009). Prosodic Analysis of Alerting and Referential Contexts of Sentinel Words. Internatioanl Conference of Acousitc Speech and Signal Processing (ICASSP'10), Submitted November 2009

47* Anagnostopoulos, G.C., Georgiopoulos, M., Kepuska, V., Morrison- Shetlar, A., Lancey, P., Krist, P., and Crouse, T. (2009). The AMALTHEA REU Program: Activities, Experiences & Outcomes of a Collaborative Summer Research Experience in Machine Learning, Proceedings of the American Society of Engineering Education (ASEE) 2009 Annual Conference and Exposition (ASEE 2009), Austin, Texas, June 14 - 17, 2009.

48* Këpuska, V., & Klein, T. (2008). On Wake-Up-Word Speech Recogntion Task, Technology, and Evaluation Results against HTK and Microsoft SDK 5.1. Invited Paper: World Congress on Nonlinear Analysts, Orlando 2008, To appear in Journal of Nonlinear Analysis, Theory, Methods & Applications. 49* Beharry, X., Këpuska, V., Powers, S., Ramdhan, R., Rojanasthien, P., Weerasooriya, A., (2008). Patriot Robotic System Design, Florida Conference on Recent Advances in Robotics, FCRAR 2008 50* Këpuska, V., Carstens, D. S., & Wallace, R. (2006). Leading and Trailing Silence in Wake-Up-Word Speech Recognition, Proceedings of the International Conference: Industry, Engineering & Management Systems 2006, Cocoa Beach, FL., 259-266.

51* Këpuska V., (2006). Wake-Up-Word Application for First Responder Communication Enhancement, SPIE, Orlando, 2006. 52* Këpuska V., Rogers N., Patel M., (2006). A MATLAB Tool for Speech Analysis, Processing and Recognition: SAR-LAB, ASEE, Chicago, 2006.

Këpuska Page A1.65 Appendix A1 53* Kasza T., Shahsavari M., Këpuska V., Chen Ch., (2006). Communications Protocol for RF-based Indoor Wireless Localization Systems, SPIE, Orlando, 2006. 54* Anagnostopoulos G., Georgiopoulos M., Ports K., Richie S., White M., Këpuska V., Chan P. K., Wu A., Kysilka M., (2006). Engaging Undergraduate Students in Machine Learning Research: Progress, Experiences and Achievements of Project EMD-MLR, Proceedings of the ASEE 2006 Annual Conference and Exposition, June 18-21, Chicago, Illinois. 55* Anagnostopoulos G., Georgiopoulos M., Ports K., Richie S., Cardinale N., White M., Këpuska V., Chan P., Wu A., Kysilka M., (2005). Project EMD-MLR: Educational Material Development and Research in Machine Learning for Undergraduate Students, Session 3232, Proceedings of the ASEE 2005 Annual Conference and Exposition, June 12-15, Portland, Oregon. 56* Mason, S. and Këpuska, V., (1992). On the Representation of Close-Range Network Design Knowledge, XVII ISPRS Congress, Washington D.C., August 1992. 57* Këpuska, V. and Mason, S., (1991). Automatic Signalized Point Recognition with Feed-Forward Neural Network, IEE Second International conference on Artificial Neural Networks, Bournemouth, U.K., November, 1991. 58* Mason, S., Beyer, H., and Këpuska, V., (1991). An AI-based Photogrammetric Network Design System, First Australian Photogrammetric Conference, University of Newcastle, Australia, November 1991. 59* Këpuska, V. and Mason, S., (1991). Artificial Neural Network Approach to Signalized Point Recognition in Aerial Photographs, First Australian Photogrammetric Conference, University of Newcastle, Australia, November 1991. 60* Këpuska, V., Beyer, H. and Mason, S., (1991). Artificial Neural Networks for Calibration of CCD-Cameras, Workshop on Industrial Applications of Neural Networks, Ascona, Switzerland, September 1991. 61* Këpuska, V. and Gowdy, J., (1990). On the Effect of Topological Structure of the Kohonen Network on the Performance of the Hierarchical two Layered Isolated Word Recognition System, IEEE Southeastcon Symposium, New Orleans, April 1990. 62* Këpuska, V. and Gowdy, J., (1989). Investigation of Phonemic Context in Speech using Self-Organizing Feature Maps, IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing - ICASSP’89, Glasgow, Scotland, May 1989. 63* Këpuska, V. and Gowdy, J., (1989). Phonemic Speech Recognition Based on Neural Network, IEEE Southeastcon Symposium, Columbia, April 1989. 64* Këpuska, V. and Gowdy, J., (1988). The Kohonen Net for Speaker Dependent Isolated Word Recognition, IEEE Southeastern Symposium on Systems Theory, UNCC Charlotte, March 1988. 65* Këpuska, V. and Gowdy, J., (1987). Evaluation of Digital Signal Processing Chips for Speech Processing Applications, IEEE Southeastern Symposium on Systems Theory, Clemson University, Clemson, March 1987. 66* Këpuska, V. and Gacaferri, J., (1979). The Determination of the Polynomial Coefficients for Approximation of the EKG with Computer, (in Serbo-Croatian), Symposium JUREMA, Zagreb 1979.

Këpuska Page A1.66 Appendix A1 PUBLIC REPORTS:

67* Këpuska, V. and Mason. S., NFP23: Design and Analysis of Spatial Image Sequences, Wissentsschaflicher Bericht zum Schweizerischer Nationalfonds zer Förderung der Wissentsschaftlicher Forschung, 1992. 68* Këpuska, V. and Mason, S., Design and Analysis of Spatial Image Sequences, NFP 23 Third Annual Status Report, Bern, July 6, 1992. 69* Këpuska, V. and Mason. S., NFP23: Design and Analysis of Spatial Image Sequences, Wissentsschaflicher Bericht zum Schweizerischer Nationalfonds zer Förderung der Wissentsschaftlicher Forschung, 1991. 70* Këpuska, V. and Mason, S., Design and Analysis of Spatial Image Sequences, NFP 23 Second Annual Status Report, Bern, June 5, 1992. 71* Mason, S. and Këpuska, V., NFP 23: Design and Analysis of Spatial Image Sequences (Project Summary), SGAICO Newsletter, Swiss Group for Artificial Intelligence and Cognitive Science, 1991.

PROFESSIONAL MEMBERSHIPS:

1* Past Member of Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE). 2* Past Member of International Neural Network Society (INNS).

SPECIAL SKILLS:

3* Languages: Albanian (Mother Tongue), English, Serbo-Croatian, German (beginner), Turkish (beginner).

11* A2. Supporting Documentation for Teaching and Related Activities

Graduate Courses Promotion Ad

Written Text Book Chapters

ECE 3552 & 4553 Multifarious Systems 1 & 2 Laboratory Material

ECE 3551 & 3552 Microcomputer Systems 1 &2 Laboratory Material

Example Project from ECE 3553

12* A3. Supporting Documentation for Scholarly and Research Related Activities

Greatest Commercial Potential - "Smart Room" Senior Design 2008.

Best Junior Design- Visual Sound

Best Paper Nomination " A MATLAB TOOL FOR SPEECH PROCESSING, ANALYSIS AND RECOGNITION: SAR-LAB " ASEE 2006 - Top 9 Papers of ASEE Conference.

Proceeding of the 2007 AMLATHEA REU Program

AMALTHEA Focus Group Report 2007

13* A4. Supporting Documentation for Service and Related Activities

NIST Rich Transcription Evaluation Workshop 2009

Laser Day 2007

Parent E-Mail of Potential Student

14* A5. Department Head Letter of Nomination

15* A6. Letters of Recommendation from Outside Reviewers

Academic References 1. Walter Rodriguez, PhD Professor and Director, Institute for Technological Innovation Director of Grants and Research Florida Golf Coast University Fort Myers, Florida 33965 E-mail: [email protected] Tel: (239)590-7360

2. Michael Georgiopoulos, Ph.D. Professor, EE Program EE and CpE Program Graduate Coordinator School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science University of Central Florida 4000 Central Florida Boulevard Harris Center (Suite 345) Orlando, FL 32816 Phone: 407.823.5338 Fax: 407.823.5835 E-Mail: [email protected]

3. John Gowdy, PhD Professor of Engineering, Former Department Chair, Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Undergraduate Program Coordinator, Founder and director of the Speech and Audio Processing Laboratory Clemson University, Clemson S.C. Office: 205 Riggs Hall Office Phone: 864.656.5249 Fax: 864.656.5910Email: E-mail: [email protected]

Këpuska Page A6.100 Appendix A6 References from Industry

1. Dr. Ken Ports Director, Strategic Operations QTSI Cocoa Beach, Fl 321 868 0288 x104 E-mail:[email protected]

2. Dr. Joachim G. Taiber BMW Group Head of IT Research Office Information Technology Research Center (ITRC) 1400 Highway 101 South Greer, SC 29651 Phone: 864.989.5421 Cell: 864.905.0015 E-mail: [email protected]

3. Theodore G. Paraskevakos President and CEO Intelligent Currency Validation Networks: ICVN 2331 York Road, Timonium, Maryland 21093 Phone: 410.252.817 Fax.: 410.252.2988 E-Mail: [email protected] 4. Dr. Geoffrey G. Parkhurst COO Symphonix, LLC 51 Dow Highway Eliot, M E 03903 Phone: 781 929.3800 E-mail: [email protected] WWW: www.symphonixllc.com

5. George Kontis Vice President Business Development Knight's Armament Company 701 Columbia Blvd. Titusville, FL 32780 Phone: 321.607.9900 Fax.: 321.268.1498 Këpuska Page A6.101 Appendix A6 E-mail: [email protected]

6. Paul J. Gagné Chief Technology Officer 63 Great Road, Maynard, MA 01754 Phone: 978.758.0952 E-mail: [email protected]

Këpuska Page A6.103